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We have thousands of installer packages for drivers at our company and no real common repository of data in regards to what all drivers are in the files.

The packages are usually either .exe .msi or .zip

Getting the info I want from .zip appears to be pretty easy (link), however I am wondering if there is a reasonable way to extract all of the .inf files from a given .exe or .msi file? I noticed that both Winzip and 7zip can see some of the items in the package files, but the linked solution doesn't seem to like attempting to read the packages.

Thank you for your time!

Roman Marusyk
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Kevin
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  • I can see reading and or capturing the .zip file contents.. but the msi sounds like you will need to extract the contents then write a separate program to look for the .INI file(s) and read them from each of the extracted file locations same with the .exe is how I would do it ..here is an example of how to extract the msi file http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12489317/can-i-extract-contents-of-msi-package-from-within-c-or-c-sharp-program – MethodMan Sep 11 '15 at 21:35
  • Hello, parsing the files after extraction is the easy part. What I am stuck on is how to either extract them from a .exe file (extract them) or somehow read the contents of the .exe file. Since the bulk of our installation files are .exe, those are the most critical for me to get the data from. Or were you suggesting that the method suggested for getting the files form the .exe is similar to how you get the files out of the .msi ? – Kevin Sep 14 '15 at 18:32

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The ZIP archives should not be too hard to handle. There are plenty tools and APIs to work with zip files.

MSI files can be modified programmatically with VBScript using a SQL-like syntax. See Examples of Database Queries Using SQL and Script for a start. You can also use Orca, a database table editor for MSI packages. I can run from the command line and can be used to extract files from the archive. See its command line options for details.

Marius Bancila
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  • Hello Marius, Thanks for the reply! I will try this out right away! – Kevin Sep 14 '15 at 14:59
  • The downside is that the majority of the driver packages our engineering groups create are .exe types. Those are the primary targets. If anyone has any suggestions on a way to read the data from the .exe files (without having to execute them), it would be greatly appreciated. – Kevin Sep 14 '15 at 15:08