Ever been in the need of extracting Windows installer files?



Usage:

unshield.os4 [-c COMPONENT] [-d DIRECTORY] [-D LEVEL] [-g GROUP] [-G] [-h] [-l]
[-V] c|l|x CABFILE

Options:
        -c COMPONENT  Only list/extract this component
        -d DIRECTORY  Extract files to DIRECTORY
        -D LEVEL      Set debug log level
                        0 - No logging (default)
                        1 - Errors only
                        2 - Errors and warnings
                        3 - Errors, warnings and debug messages
        -g GROUP      Only list/extract this file group
        -h            Show this help message
        -j            Junk paths (do not make directories)
        -L            Make file and directory names lowercase
        -V            Print copyright and version information

Commands:
        c             List components
        g             List file groups
        l             List files
        t             Test files
        x             Extract files

Other:
        CABFILE       The file to list or extract contents of


An installer created by the InstallShield software stores the files it will
install inside of InstallShield Cabinet Files. It would thus be desirable to be
able to extract the Microsoft Cabinet Files from the InstallShield Cabinet
Files
in order to be able to install the applications without access to Microsoft
Windows.

 The format of InstallShield Cabinet Files is not officially documented but
there are two tools available for Microsoft Windows that extracts files from
InstallShield installers, and they are distributed with source code included.
These tools are named "i5comp" and "i6comp" and can be downloaded from the
Internet.

 One major drawback with these tools are that for the actual decompression of
the files stored in the InstallShield Cabinet Files they require the use of
code
written by InstallShield that is not available as source code. Luckily, by
examining this code with the 'strings' tool, I discovered that they were using
the open source zlib library (www.gzip.org/zlib) for decompression.

 I could have modified i5comp and i6comp to run on other operating systems than
Microsoft Windows, but I preferred to use them as a reference for this
implementation. The goals of this implementation are:

Use a well known open source license (MIT)
Work on both little-endian and big-endian systems
Separate the implementation in a tool and a library
Support InstallShield versions 5 and later
Be able to list contents of InstallShield Cabinet Files
Be able to extract files from InstallShield Cabinet Files

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
[generic]                43246   96732  44.7% -lh5- 742d Oct 23 02:51 unshield.os4
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         1 file    43246   96732  44.7%            Nov 24 13:56