6 replies to this topic

[simontrain]

Hi,

We're trying to find a way of extracting the files from self-extracting executable installers (Installshield).
We want to be able to extract the MSI file and all supporting CAB files etc. from an Installshield EXE installer.

We want to build this functionality into a tool, and the command line approach seems to be unreliable as different EXE installer have their own command line switches.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Simon

[Stefan Krueger]

You basically have two options:

A) find out which command line parameters the exe supports. InstallShield only has a limited number of self extracting tools (2 or 3), however a developer might have used any other third party tool (WinZIP, RAR, ...) so you can only cover the most common types.

Launch the setup and monitor the TEMP directory. When the first modal dialog is on the screen the setup files are most likely fully extracted to a sub folder of the TEMP folder. After picking them up from there, you can cancel the setup. Note that some prerequisites may already be installed at that point (e.g. Windows Installer runtime) so if you want to keep your machine clean you should use a virtual machine for this (VirtualPC or VMware).

[simontrain]

So, there's no way to uncompress the installer exe to get at the files?

Many zip tools (like WinZip) will let you view CAB SFX files, however they can't read an Installshield-generated setup.exe...?

Regards, Simon

[Stefan Krueger]

It depends. Some InstallShield self extracting exes (if created with PackageForTheWeb) can be opened with WinZIP. But other don't (they use a different compression algorithm for higher compression rates). If you know it's InstallShield then try /extract_all:<path> to unpack or /a for administrative installation.

[simontrain]

ok, setup.exe /a /s /v"TARGETDIR=C:\temp /qn" allows me to run an installer executable...however, I can't just run this for any exe our tool locates. Is there any way to detect the following:

1. Is this executable an installshield installer?
2. Is it an InstallScript installer?
3. Is it a basic MSI installer?

Thanks, Simon

[Stefan Krueger]

It may be possible by looking at the version info of the executable.

[simontrain]

I've tried this, however file version is not reliable because a vendor may change any properties of the installer executable via MSI properties...?