Discovering Command Line Switches

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23378401

  •  12-07-2023
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Question

Some software allows it's installation process to be ran from the command like with various switches. A classic example is silent installs with the /S or /VERYSILENT switch. But, oftentimes it's not documented.

Is there any software available that can list any installation or command line flags for an installer without knowing what type of installer is being used (such as MSI, InstallSheild, Inno Setup etc)

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Solution

One source is unattended.org - there is lots of information to check out there. I generally use experience to tell what type of setup.exe I am dealing with. Plus the information found in the property page. You can of course also use a tool to search the exe for strings - I know there are executables that will do this for you, but I find them of limited use. The last one I tried had compatibility issues. Visual Studio could be used too, there are several ways to open a binary. Both as a resource and as a binary stream. Maybe this works too, never tried.

For MSI files you can use this special command line builder tool to build complicated command lines (it appears this tool may have been taken offline. I will leave this in for now).

Further information for Installshield setup.exe and update.exe files can be found here.

For other setup.exe files you might want to try the obvious solution with a command prompt and setup.exe /? first to see if there is help available.

And for the special case of Windows update msu files (Windows Update Standalone Installer) I kick them off in sequence using the following command line from an admin level command prompt (will run all updates in the folder silently without restart):

for %h in (*x64*.msu) do start /wait wusa "%cd%\%h" /quiet /norestart

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