Programmatically extract contents of InstallShield setup exe

Question

I am trying to extract the file-contents of an InstallShield setup exe-file   My plan is to use it in a back-office tool  so this must be done programmatically without any user interactions    Is this possible   Initial research seems to indicate it will fail    If it is possible to have a generic solution  for all recent versions of InstallShield that would be best  Otherwise  if a solution only works for some versions of InstallShield it would be a step on the way   It would probably be possible to deduce which InstallShield version a setup exe is by looking at version  resources of the exe-file   I found that some InstallShield versions support  b  or  extract all  However there is no good way of knowing  just launching the exe and hoping it will extract and terminate orderly rather then displaying GUI dialogs doesn t seem like a good solution  So I am therefore looking for a more stable way  Ideas welcome

User · Answer

On Linux there is unshield  which worked well for me  even if the GUI includes custom deterrents like license key prompts   It is included in the repositories of all major distributions  arch  suse  debian- and fedora-based  and its source is available at https   github com twogood unshield

User · Answer

Start with   setup exe      And you should see a dialog popup with some options displayed

User · Answer

There s no supported way to do this  but won t you have to examine the files related to each installer to figure out how to actually install them after extracting them  Assuming you can spend the time to figure out which command-line applies  here are some candidate parameters that normally allow you to extract an installation   MSI Based  may not result in a usable image for an InstallScript MSI installation     setup exe  a  s  v  qn TARGETDIR   choose-a-location     or  to also extract prerequisites  for versions where it works   setup exe  a choose-another-location   s  v  qn TARGETDIR   choose-a-location      InstallScript based    setup exe  s  extract all   Suite based  may not be obvious how to install the resulting files     setup exe  silent  stage only ISRootStagePath  choose-a-location

User · Answer

The free and open-source program called cabextract will list and extract the contents of not just  cab-files  but Macrovision s archives too     cabextract  tmp QLWREL EXE Extracting cabinet   tmp QLWREL EXE   extracting ikernel dll   extracting IsProBENT tlb          extracting IScript dll   extracting iKernel rgs  All done  no errors

User · Answer

http   www compdigitec com labs files isxunpack exe  Usage  isxunpack exe yourinstallshield exe  It will extract in the same folder

[installation] Programmatically extract contents of InstallShield setup.exe

Examples related to installation

Examples related to installshield