What is the point of this?

[Torchizard]

I've come across many applications that have two or more exes in the form of

application,1.exe

application,2.exe

What is the point of this?

[bphlpt]

Can you give a specific example, preferably with a link so that we can see for ourselves?

Cheers and Regards

[GrofLuigi]

I've seen many such files (not only exes) in inno setup distributions. They are two versions, either x86/x64 or unicode/non-unicode and the correct file will be renamed without the ,1 and installed. Also, sometimes binary identical files are named like this - maybe a quirk of the installer or badly prepared script.

Of course, this case may be something different...

GL

[Torchizard]

Can you give a specific example, preferably with a link so that we can see for ourselves?

Cheers and Regards

This is the link to the software...

http://www.freewarebox.com/free_25098_321soft-data-recovery-express-download.html

When i UniExtracted the installer, I came across two files named 321recovery,1.exe and 321recovery,2.exe

I've seen this before but never really thought why this is done.

Edit: While in this example, the files are equal in size, I've seen different sized exes before. I ran them through Winmerge and it says they are completely identical.

Edited October 25, 2013 by Torchizard

[GrofLuigi]

Yes, it's the case I described. See install_script.iss where it renames them both.

But... It may also be a "feature" of innounp.exe which recreates the compiled script and probably can't cope with all situations. Example: http://sourceforge.net/p/innounp/discussion/353235/thread/62a8d3d6/

GL

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

It's perfectly normal. And not just EXE files, could be anything, CHM, DLL, etc. I see it mostly with Inno setups and it is a consequence of distributing multiple variations / versions of files with identical filenames in the same package. Sometimes ,1 is English and ,2 another language. Sometimes one is 32-bit, and another 64-bit.

InnoUnp handles this very well IMHO. It successfully extracts the native portion of the ISS script so that you can easily read the target locations for each file and the logic behind it. In fact if you decompile the actual Inno distributions, you should see this with the two main EXE and DLL files.

Unfortunately any Pascal scripting in the ISS does not presently get extracted. So, if there was some programming that processed files such as these from the Pascal section then we would be stuck trying to understand the reasoning. Fortunately I have never yet seen this with respect to the ,1 or ,2 ... suffixes.