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Universal Extractor

nitro322

By nitro322
in Universal Extractor

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nitro322

nitro322

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Posted (edited)

Updated: 10/17/2008

Version 1.6 Released - Please see the Universal Extractor Latest Version for details of this release, and all releases going forward.

I was inspired by ZoSTeR's Universal Silent Switch Finder, so I wrote an application to do something I've wanted for quite a long time: an easy way to extract files from executable files, installation packages, .msi files, etc.

I often have a need to unpack other application packages, whether it's to get a file out of it and I don't feel like installing the full application, or I'm investigating how to perform a silent install, or whatever the case may be. In the past it's always resulted in some internet research and dropping to a command line to do it manually. Now, I just right-click and select Extract. :-) PEiD was the key to this, so thanks, ZoSTeR, for the idea.

In the process, I also decided to add support for pretty much any archive/compression format I could think of. While this isn't overly helpful if you already own a good archiving utility such as WinRAR, I find it convenient to have a commone way of extracting everything. Also, since the package only uses freely redistributable components (mostly open source), it can be quite useful to send to somebody that needs to extract an odd file but doesn't have a supporting program.

Well, I guess that should be enough exposition. :-) I'm posting this here bacause:

  • You people rock and have helped me out numerous times in the past
  • As I said, I got the idea from ZoSTeR, so wanted to give back to the community
  • I personally find this extremely useful for packaging, and various other tasks that this particular board is dedicated to. I think you will as well.

Please view the Universal Extractor website for complete technical details, supported formats, and full source code. This is on a DSL connection, so please don't hammer it too hard.

Direct downloads:

Please see Universal Extractor Latest Version

I hope you find this useful.

Edited by nitro322

MCT

MCT

Posted
Posted

just a thought, good idea & all, but how about instead of having a dos box open u could have a GUI instead ?

McStarfighter

McStarfighter

Posted
Posted

I have the problem that nearly everytime it hangs after I click in the context menu on "Extract". Then it shows the "scanning file" bar and I do NOTHING. And when I push ctrl+alt+del It shows me an error code.

nitro322

nitro322

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)
can you list currently supported archives, or are all supported already in \bin\formats ?

atomizer, the supported formats are listed in detail on the app's home page.

I have the problem that nearly everytime it hangs after I click in the context menu on "Extract". Then it shows the "scanning file" bar and I do NOTHING. And when I push ctrl+alt+del It shows me an error code.

McStarfighter, can you please give me an example of the kind of file you're trying to extract? I've never seen this behavior.

i dont like that when u extract a cabbed file, this one extracts to a folder......not to the uncabbed file.....

boooggy, what do you mean? What exactly is an uncabbed file?

just a thought, good idea & all, but how about instead of having a dos box open u could have a GUI instead ?

Wish I could, but for now that's not possible. The UniExtract front-end doesn't do any of the work itself - it calls all of the other binaries in bin\ to extract the files. As a result, there's no way for UniExtract to know the current status or progress of any given operation; the only thing it knows for sure is the beginning and end points. It would be easy to hide the DOS box and only show a static GUI message like, "Extracting. Please wait...", but I find it much more useful to know the current status of the operation.

With that said, the current beta versions of AutoIt does allow STDIO operations with external DOS programs. As a long-term goal I plan on moving to this approach (also noted in the ToDo file), which should at least allow me to wrap the output in a GUI text box. I still won't be able to give a simple progress bar, but it would look much cleaner. That'll be coming in version 2.0. :-)

Edited by nitro322
REDRUM

REDRUM

Posted
Posted
I have the problem that nearly everytime it hangs after I click in the context menu on "Extract". Then it shows the "scanning file" bar and I do NOTHING. And when I push ctrl+alt+del It shows me an error code.

I am getting this everytime i try to extract adobe reader, quicktime and firefox.

nitro322

nitro322

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I have the problem that nearly everytime it hangs after I click in the context menu on "Extract". Then it shows the "scanning file" bar and I do NOTHING. And when I push ctrl+alt+del It shows me an error code.

I am getting this everytime i try to extract adobe reader, quicktime and firefox.

Ok, I still haven't been able to duplicate this behavior. I don't think that Adobe Reader cannot be extracted with UniExtract, so that may not make a good test case. Quicktime I'm not sure about one way or another. Firefox, however, definitely works. I just downloaded and tested again to make sure that nothing changed in version 1.5, and it still works fine. It's a Self-Extracting 7-Zip archive, so UniExtract should call 7z.exe to extract the contents.

With that said, I did notice a couple oddities while testing for this problem. If you've already extracted the archive and try to extract again (while the previous folder still exists), UniExtract will appear to hang after spawning an empty command shell. What's actually happening is 7-Zip is prompting you to confirm whether or not you want to overwrite the existing files; however, for some reason the prompt itself is not shown. Simply hitting a then enter will make it continue. Now, I've only just encountered this problem with 7-Zip while extracting the Firefox installer, so I don't know how pervasive it is. I'll do some more testing and figure out a better way to deal with this. Regardless, though, this doesn't appear to be related to your problem since this occurs after the file is scanned with PEiD.

I also noticed that when using the Explorer integration, short names (8.3) are used instead of long file names when creating the new directory. I've already tracked down this problem and will include the fix in the next release.

Finally, I have a couple other questions for you, to help track down your problem. #1, are you using the installed version, or the self-extracting version? #2, do you have any other copies of PEiD open when you're running UniExtract?

Thanks for the feedback. I am very interested in making this the best it can possibly be, so please keep it coming.

ATM

ATM

Posted
Posted

You know something

U did jus wat i was goin to do

I jus started with the code which will allow to unpack

only installtions not other archives

for other archives i use IZArc

http://www.izsoft.dir.bg

which unpacks every known archive including

bin,iso,nrg,img files

So i think u oly concentrate on unpacin installers

let IZArc do the other job

BTW u can call IZArc from commandline and avoid use of

other files

Just a suggestion

hop u lik it :w00t:

:thumbup

boooggy

boooggy

Posted
Posted

if i have a file lets say rundll32.dl_ and i extract it using your progie....it will extract to a folder not to the file rundll32.dll...... :P

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