[nitro322]

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.

This post has been edited by nitro322: 18 October 2008 - 12:05 PM

[glent]

Very useful thanks , testing now

[hamohd70]

thankx.
very useful.

[MCT]

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

[atomizer]

can you list currently supported archives, or are all supported already in \bin\formats ?

and thanks for the util!

[McStarfighter]

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.

[natan770]

Works like a charm... this is a good product. In particular, nice to get ISS setups easily extracted. Go on...

[boooggy]

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

[nitro322]

atomizer, on Dec 11 2005, 05:27 AM, said:

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.

McStarfighter, on Dec 12 2005, 08:42 AM, said:

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.

boooggy, on Dec 12 2005, 12:44 PM, said:

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?

MCT, on Dec 11 2005, 04:33 AM, said:

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. :-)

This post has been edited by nitro322: 13 December 2005 - 07:29 AM

[darkhanzou]

BRILLIANT IDEA NITRO322!!! THIS WILL ME HELP A LOT!!!

[REDRUM]

McStarfighter, on Dec 12 2005, 02:42 PM, said:

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]

REDRUM, on Dec 15 2005, 05:56 AM, said:

McStarfighter, on Dec 12 2005, 02:42 PM, said:

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]

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

[boooggy]

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......

[Jotnar]

Another very handy msi extractor (can just unpack from the msi), is Less MSIérables. Works very nicely.

Cheers

[nitro322]

boooggy, on Dec 17 2005, 07:27 AM, said:

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......

Ahh. Yeah, I know what you mean. I actually considered this issue during development. However, I have common code that takes care of initial setup and then final verification of extraction for each type of archive. I would need to create a special case specifically for this type of file to get around it, and just didn't want to go down that route.

Additionally, since every other archive type extracts to a subdirectory, I figured this one as well, if only for consistency. I hope this isn't too much of an inconvenience. :-)

For the next version I'll probably look into this again, see if there's some better way of handling it. However, as I said, I'd prefer not to create a special case just for this one filetype, so we'll see what happens.

ATM, on Dec 17 2005, 02:55 AM, said:

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

Thanks for the suggestion, ATM. I actually do exactly this with 7-Zip. which I use to open .7z, 7-Zip SFX .exe, .bz2, .cab, .chm, .cpio, .deb, .gz, .lzh, .rpm, .tar, and .Z files. I still use some other standalone binaries, however, because they may support their native format more robustly. For example, the official unrar.exe can open certain RAR files (particularly SFX files) that 7-Zip cannot, despite the fact that it does support RAR files.

I chose to use 7-Zip rather than IZArc primarily because it's open source (which I am a huge proponent of), and because it has a great command line interface. However, I didn't realize that IZArc could handle .iso files. I'll look into it and see if it's possible to use in my program.

This post has been edited by nitro322: 16 January 2006 - 07:24 PM

[nitro322]

I just released version 1.0 of Universal Extractor. Please see the original post for details and download links.

As usual, feedback is most welcome.

[smashly]

Hi and Thank You nitro322.
I've tried your uniextract10.exe , the installer version worked sweet as for me on a short try (gunna give your proggy a flogging when I get home work...lol)

But the uniextract10_noinst.exe just keeps coming up with crc errors when I try to extract the archive (pasted from SFX window)

CRC failed in bin\arj.exe
Extracting bin\E_WISE_W.EXE
CRC failed in bin\E_WISE_W.EXE
Extracting bin\helpdeco.exe
CRC failed in bin\helpdeco.exe
Extracting bin\i6comp.exe
CRC failed in bin\i6comp.exe
Extracting bin\innounp.exe
CRC failed in bin\innounp.exe
Extracting bin\IsXunpack.exe
CRC failed in bin\IsXunpack.exe
Extracting bin\lzop.exe
CRC failed in bin\lzop.exe
Extracting bin\PEiD.exe
CRC failed in bin\PEiD.exe
Extracting bin\tee.exe
CRC failed in bin\tee.exe
Extracting bin\UniExtract.exe
CRC failed in bin\UniExtract.exe
Extracting bin\UnRAR.exe
CRC failed in bin\UnRAR.exe
Extracting bin\unzip.exe
CRC failed in bin\unzip.exe
Extracting bin\WUN.exe
CRC failed in bin\WUN.exe
Extracting bin\xace.exe
CRC failed in bin\xace.exe
Extracting bin\Formats\7z.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\7z.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\7zAES.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\7zAES.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\AES.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\AES.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\Branch.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\Branch.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\bz2.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\bz2.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\BZip2.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\BZip2.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\cab.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\cab.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\chm.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\chm.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\Copy.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\Copy.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\cpio.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\cpio.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\deb.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\deb.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\Deflate.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\Deflate.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\gz.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\gz.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\lzh.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\lzh.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\LZMA.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\LZMA.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\PPMd.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\PPMd.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\rpm.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\rpm.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\split.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\split.dll
Extracting bin\Codecs\Swap.dll
CRC failed in bin\Codecs\Swap.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\tar.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\tar.dll
Extracting bin\Formats\z.dll
CRC failed in bin\Formats\z.dll
Extracting bin\ZD51145.DLL
CRC failed in bin\ZD51145.DLL
Extracting bin\Codecs
Extracting docs
Extracting bin\Formats
Extracting bin
Extracting UniExtract.au3
Extracting support\Icons\uniextract_exe.ico
CRC failed in support\Icons\uniextract_exe.ico
Extracting support\Icons\uniextract_files.ico
CRC failed in support\Icons\uniextract_files.ico

I have tried clearing my temp and internet cache and dl'n again , same crc failures when unpacking though.
Could you please post the MD5 for uniextract10_noinst.exe

The MD5 I get for uniextract10_noinst.exe: B281C1276D2D36B8C09452151649857C (Size 1.84MB (1,934,224 bytes))
cheers

PS. Hope you don't mind me adding your prog to my SA Utils personal package.
if so let me know.
SA Utils Info: http://www.msfn.org/...showtopic=65085

This post has been edited by smashly: 17 January 2006 - 05:10 AM

[Lost Soul]

thats a great app nitro good job, i usually use various methods to extract but this does make things more convenent,

[nitro322]

Quote

But the uniextract10_noinst.exe just keeps coming up with crc errors when I try to extract the archive (pasted from SFX window)

smashly, I can confirm this error. Not sure what happened, though. When I get home tonight I'll compare it to my local copy and see what's going on.

Also, I don't have any problem with you adding it to your SA package (which looks pretty cool, btw). After all, the whole reason I put this out there is for others to benefit from it. :-)