UniExtract 1.6.1 in development - info requested

[nitro322]

I wish to remind you of this recent post of mine, about adding MsiX, which would extend the support for .msi, .msm and .msp, and should be relatively simple to add...

Thanks for the suggestion. Will look into it. If it's not too tricky (MSI support is fairly ugly within UniExtract) I'll try to get it included in this release. Otherwise, it will be targeted in the next feature release.

Edited May 8, 2010 by nitro322

[gora]

I have added the following in a script:

Before unpacking stock-taking of a folder of unpacking is made. If the folder is present, the message to the user about a possible error is deduced and the offer to remove a folder before the extraction beginning. Now the user is warned about an extraction cause of error.

[nitro322]

I wish to remind you of this recent post of mine, about adding MsiX, which would extend the support for .msi, .msm and .msp, and should be relatively simple to add...

Thanks for the suggestion. Will look into it. If it's not too tricky (MSI support is fairly ugly within UniExtract) I'll try to get it included in this release. Otherwise, it will be targeted in the next feature release.

Done, for MSI and MSP files (MSM supposedly support as well, but I have none to test). Was nice and easy; I like this utility. :-)

Here's a request of my own - can someone do some testing of this against the other MSI and MSP options and see if any of them can be dropped in favor of this? I did some pretty thorough testing of all the existing options and found that they all can be useful in certain circumstances, but if MsiX can fully replace one or more of them then I'd much prefer to trim that list.

[nitro322]

Before unpacking stock-taking of a folder of unpacking is made. If the folder is present, the message to the user about a possible error is deduced and the offer to remove a folder before the extraction beginning. Now the user is warned about an extraction cause of error.

The problem with that approach is it's possible to extract files to an existing folder filled with other files. For example, I very frequently use the 'UniExtract Here...' option to extract files, and I most definitely don't want to delete the current working directory, nor even offer the option. I also may extract files directly to C:\Windows or some other such directory, depending on what specifically I'm extracting, and obviously we wouldn't want to delete that either.

This would be useful when using the 'UniExtract to Subdir...' option, but I don't think covering that one possibility alone would be worthwhile. It could help in some circumstances, but it'd also be incomplete and provide inconsistent feedback.

On the other hand, tweaking the error message to include a statement about the folder already existing would work, but there's a catch here as well - this would require an update to the translation files, which I won't be able to do for this release. It's a very time-consuming process to get support for all of the foreign languages updated. So, this option would also need to wait until the next major release.

[dencorso]

Done, for MSI and MSP files (MSM supposedly support as well, but I have none to test). Was nice and easy; I like this utility. :-)

Great! Thanks a lot!

[nitro322]

Done, for MSI and MSP files (MSM supposedly support as well, but I have none to test). Was nice and easy; I like this utility. :-)

Here's a request of my own - can someone do some testing of this against the other MSI and MSP options and see if any of them can be dropped in favor of this? I did some pretty thorough testing of all the existing options and found that they all can be useful in certain circumstances, but if MsiX can fully replace one or more of them then I'd much prefer to trim that list.

Two quick updates:

1. Added detection (TrID) and extraction support for MSM files
   
2. Dropped msi2xml in favor of MsiX
   

In my brief testing, MsiX seems to do everything at least as well as msi2xml, so I didn't see a need to keep it around. I only commented out msi2xml support, though, so I can easily re-add it later if necessary. Again, feedback would be welcome here. Also, with MsiX, is there a still a need to have the Total Commander MSI extractor as well? Ideally I'd like to knock this down to just two options: an administrative install by default (this is the cleanest option, when it works), and a "ripper" such as MsiX to forcibly extract files when the administrative option fails or is restricted.

[nitro322]

I think I'm done. I still need to update the installer (there have been a few changes to Inno Setup since my last release), but in the meantime I have the noinst version packaged and uploaded to my server. I'd really appreciate it if I could get at least a couple people to do some quick testing. Specifically:

• environmental variable support - should work for debug directory and file/directory selection; any issues?
  
• MSI/MSP - did addition of MSM affect detection of MSI and MSP?
  
• 7-zip does generic resource extraction on unknown .exe files now - does this negatively affect extraction of files that previously worked?
  
• FEAD support - does new PEiD detection work properly? Any false positives?
  
• Windows 7 support - no specific changes, but if anything doesn't work quite right, please let me know

Thanks. Please try to report back ASAP - still hoping to get the final version out tonight. Heck, also let me know if you don't find any problems, that'll also help. :-)

Download: http://www.legroom.net/public/uniextract161beta_noinst.rar

[nitro322]

by the way, changes since last update:

  Added support for Windows Installer merge modules (.msm) via MsiX
  Added support for environmental variables (eg., specify %temp% for debug dir)
  Changed Windows installer support (.msi, .msp) to use MsiX instead of msi2xml
  CHanged FEAD support to use PEiD rather than TrID for detection
  Fixed cosmetic bug in Visual C++ SFX status dialog
  Remove msi2xml helper binary and MSXML download link on MSI selection page
  Updated PEiD detection of Microsoft SFX cab files for more reliable extraction

[nitro322]

I have 1.6.1 packaged and ready to go, but I decided to hold off a bit to get some feedback on the beta release. I'm a bit concerned that 7-Zip may be a bit too aggressive at unpacking now and interfere with some of the other unpackers. Please grab the beta from the link above and post any feedback here. I'll keep this open until tomorrow (Monday) night; after that, I'm finalizing and publishing 1.6.1.

Thanks.

[gora]

Some updated files for UE here.

Why file TrIDDefs.TRD has the size of less original (1158820 vs 1596626) here?

[nitro322]

Why file TrIDDefs.TRD has the size of less original (1158820 vs 1596626) here?

because I'm still using the old definition set from the 1.6 release, plus some new tweaks and additions. Swapping out the TrID defs file can have a major impact on file detection, and I didn't have time for this release cycle to do the thorough regression testing I normally do.

[nitro322]

Some updated files for UE here.

Thanks. Have a few questions, though:

aspackdie - what version, and where did you download it? Latest version I could find is 1.41, which is already included, and official site seems dead

stuffit expander - can you please provide source? As far as I'm aware, 6.x was the last freely-redistributable version. If I can update to 7.x, that'd be great, but I need to verify the license.

msi.wcx - again, can you please provide the source? According to http://www.totalcmd.net/plugring/msi.html, 1.2 is the latest version, which I already have included.

pea zip - version 2.x didn't behave correctly (didn't implement GUI controls correctly, breaking UniExtract automation), so I had to stick with 1.6. I have not tested v3.x as support is ugly and I didn't want to spend a lot of time messing with it. Will check out for next major update.

unlzx - version and source, please? This doesn't seem to match up with what's available from the main page: http://xavprods.free.fr/lzx/

Edited May 10, 2010 by nitro322

[gora]

Unfortunately, I cannot specify the reference to all these components, they have been found by me and other users UE in a network.

Download msi.wcx under the reference specified by you and look at a file pluginst.inf. There version 1.2.1 is specified. Probably silent updating.

[nitro322]

Unfortunately, I cannot specify the reference to all these components, they have been found by me and other users UE in a network.

Download msi.wcx under the reference specified by you and look at a file pluginst.inf. There version 1.2.1 is specified. Probably silent updating.

OK. thanks for the info. I'll dig around a bit and see if I can find the sources myself. Would be helpful going forward as well.

[nitro322]

Incorrect criterion of check of extraction of a file (comparison of the size of a folder before/after extraction).

Well, it's not exactly incorrect, but I'd agree that it's insufficient. ... I'll give this some though to see if I can come up with a good, general, and efficient method to do better error checking, but it may need to wait until the next feature release.

I have good news and bad news here. The good news is that I think I found a good way to do this. The bad news is that I can't implement it do to a long standing bug in the interaction between 7z.exe and tee.exe that I've never been able to work around. I'll give it one more crack tomorrow night to see if I can get 7z to play nicely with tee. If so, I think this should work. If not, well, this'll have to wait. I'll provide some details, though, if anyone else wants to take a crack at it.