I'm trying to get my website to talk to a friend's program. Think ITunes - one main program with hundreds of thousands of little things installed into it. We don't want to have to create an InstallShield install program for each of those hundreds of thousands of little things.
We have the files grouped into the folder sub-structure.
We have a .REG file for what registry entry needs to be added to see the new folder group.
But is there a way to do a self extracting zip file that reads a registry entry so we know where they installed the original program to be able to dump the new files there as well? I want them to double-click the EXE and click Finish and for everything to work.
(I've been looking into INF and CAB files through IExpress.exe, but haven't found the answer. I remember Package for the Web didn't have an option to read a registry entry, but did let you modify the suggested install path.)
Thanks so much.
Best wishes,
Andrea
But is there a way to do a self extracting zip file that reads a registry entry so we know where they installed the original program to be able to dump the new files there as well? I want them to double-click the EXE and click Finish and for everything to work
Well, yes and no. There are self-extractors that can run a program after extracting all files. DotNetZip, for example, can produce an SFX which can do this.
Just an aside: a normal SFX is just a zip file, with a "stub" executable merged with it. The stub exe can do anything it wants to do, but the most basic thing it does is extract the files in the zip. When you use DotNetZip to produce an SFX, it embeds its particular stub into the zip. That stub knows how to extract files, and also knows how to invoke a program after extracting. You can also produce your own stub that can do other more exotic things.
So you could use an SFX for your purpose. When run, it would extract, then invoke it's extra program. The program could look in the registry, then move or relocate the extracted files to the appropriate place. Then terminate.
For a different twist, the SFX might have just two files: the program-to-run (the one that reads the registry, and another embedded zip. Then when the SFX runs it generates 2 files. Then it invokes the program-to-run, which reads the registry, then unpacks the contained zip and puts the files into the desired place.
Ok, so you could do it.
Should you?
mmm, maybe. This really is an installer, so, you should decide whether you want to use a zip as an installer. Don't forget, if you use an SFX as an installer, there's no good way to uninstall.
Have you tried Inno Setup toolchain? It's a bit better than a bare Self-Extracting ZIP file, it's a setup creation utility. I'm convinced it has got something to put some entry in the Registry, look also at the plugins.
Basically, a self-extracting executable that alters the registry, it's a setup program. So why don't you go for a proper one?
Website: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
Related
Is there a way to scan a .jar file to see each step that the program takes? I just ask because I found a .jar file that will supposedly generate pdf files for me out of Tableau. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the author of the .jar file and want to make sure that I'm not getting something I don't want.
I also have a similar issue with an .exe file. Is there a way to scan the .exe file to see the steps that it takes?
Yes to both.
Jar is easier, there are a few jar decompilers. Classy Shark is simple to use.
There's also the JetBrains decompiler org.jetbrains.java.decompiler.main.decompiler.ConsoleDecompiler which makes a little cleaner code, but is more complex to install.
For exe files, it depends on how it was created, if it's .Net, then you can pull it apart pretty easily with ILSpy.
If the exe was written in something else, it gets much more complicated fast.
So, I decompressed an exe file and modified it, and I want to recompress it back to exe form, not an SFX archive.
I can't find an internet solution for my problem, all of the posts I look at talk about recompressing to an SFX file, which I do not want to do, I want to convert it to a fully working exe.
I think you are looking for IExpress.exe: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-self-extracting-archives-without-installing-software/
Modifying a binary file without breaking it requires a knowledge of hex or assembly. You can't just decompress and compress it back.
How ever there are tools that has ability to make some minor changes to an exe file. This one is an example. Those tools can only alter exe file's resources like icons, some of the texts, images etc.
Hope this helped.
I want to implement an autoupdater in my Python application. This is no problem with the source version; Python doesn't care at all that the script it's running is trying to overwrite itself.
Windows, however, does care if an EXE tries to overwrite itself. My question is, does my EXE even have to overwrite itself? Or is the EXE just an interpreter, and I only have to overwrite library.zip?
If it does, is there any alternative to starting an updater application and shutting down the main EXE?
The cx_Freeze exe is compiled along with cx_Freeze, so in most cases you can safely leave it alone and just update library.zip. However, you should make sure that you prepare your updates using the same version of cx_Freeze that you froze the application with originally, in case it expects specific things about the files around it.
Also, the exe gets stamped with a version number relating to your application (you can see it in the file properties). If you don't replace it, that version number won't change.
If you do need to replace the exe, I believe the trick is to copy it to a temporary folder and re-run from there, so that it can replace the original. You can also look into update frameworks like Esky, which aim to handle these kinds of details for you. I haven't used that, so I don't know how well it works.
we actually build an InstallShield project for our application with the functionality to include files dynamic into a component. All files will be taken which are in a specific place.
Because of problems, which are not part of this question, we want to change this to components where we add files explicit to custom separated components.
The question is, is there a best practice for this? We have the small fear that we easily can forget to add files to the component we new created. These can be dll files, .config files, pdfs or just xml.
(We build the installer every night using TFS.)
We found a solution for the problem.
What we wanted to solve:
During the build we want to be informed if files got removed
During the build we want to be informed if new files are missing
we solved this by two more or less easy things.
1. Information if a file is removed
This is easy sone, we have all files added explicitly, each single file is an own component now, if one file is missing the whole project does not build with the exact error message.
2. Information for missing files
For this we wrote a small tool which runs by a prebuild event of the installshield project.
There it opens the *.ism file as an xml file and searches for the "Files" table.
Than it takes all files from the drop folder and looks if all files are in there.
If there are files missing but we don't expect them, like pdb files or test dlls, we have an additional text file we just called "IgnoreList".
The tool skips these files by the check.
Now we are on a very good state to get informed directly on the next morning if the project was able to build or not, and if not what happened, so we can be sure that in the final target application are files are there :-)
I've been searching all day for a solution to unzip a file with AutoIt Script. I would like to unzip a file called full.zip to a folder.
This is my last place to turn since I can't find a solution of my own. I have found many solutions made by others; AutoIt3 files containing functions, but the code has issues of which I do not understand, and I'm unable to them copy here because I'm using a screen reader and it doesn't seem to format properly. This is why I can not copy code here.
Does anyone know of a method, tutorial or resource that I can use to unzip a file with AutoIt?
Thanks for any help,
josh.
There are a lot of solutions people have coded. A few examples are the 7zip UDF, Zip.au3, zipfldr UDF. If those are not working for you it is most likely because of small changes to AutoIt, which is usually just #incudes being restructured.
I usually just keep 7za.exe (7-zip's standalone executable, 7-zip can be downloaded from here, and then after installing you can copy the 7za.exe from its program directory).
Then it becomes as simple as a call to RunWait to create the archive:
RunWait("7za.exe a MyNewArchive.zip file1.ext file2.ext ...")
And then to unzip:
RunWait('7za.exe x MyArchive.zip -o"Path\To\MyOutputFolder"')
The 7-zip FAQ also mentions that you can use this exe in your own applications (including commercial ones) provided you mention it in the documentation and provide a link. That means you are ok to use FileInstall(...) to include 7za.exe in the compiled .exe.