How to Unpackage and Repackage an exe (InnoSetup / InnoUnp on Windows)

First off: My sincere apologies, this is a Windows tutorial. (I know, I know. I feel dirty too, but... what to do?)

InnoExtract isn't good enough

Although innoextract works well to extract files on OS X and Linux, it loses the metadata that would allow repacking.

InnoUnp

Anyway, I'll be using InnoUnp on Windows 8.

The nice things about Windows 8 are that it looks very clean - like Redhat 9 back in 2004 - and that it has PowerShell preinstalled, which has commands like pushd, ls, and mv that almost work the way you would expect.

7-zip

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.*

Now that Windows finally includes zip support by default it's not cool anymore and everyone has moved to rar, so you have to install 7-zip (direct link) to unpack innounp.exe from innounp###.rar

... I'm sensing a definite irony that InnoUnp wasn't packaged with InnoSetup and can't be unpacked by itself.

Extracting an Installer

Extract the installer and not only will the paths be named after their internal variable name ({path}/to/thing), but you'll also get the much coveted install_script.iss.

.\innounp.exe ExampleInstaller.exe -x -dExampleInstaller
ls .\ExampleInstaller

You'll see something like

{exampleinstaller}
install_script.iss

Repacking the Installer

In theory you can now repack your extracted installer using InnoSetup.

• http://www.jrsoftware.org/isdl.php#stable

Just open the install_script.iss with InnoSetup and recompile it.

Note that the [Files] section will likely have been expanded from recursive directory copying to actually listing each file individually.

See How to create an InnoSetup Installer

Appendix

ProTip: Windows' start is the companion to OS X's open and Linux's xdg-open

If you want to install innoextract on OS X, I put the instructions in an issue on github.

By AJ ONeal


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