innoextract - A tool to unpack installers created by Inno Setup

Inno Setup is a tool to create installers for Microsoft Windows applications. innoextract allows to extract such installers under non-windows systems without running the actual installer using wine. innoextract currently supports installers created by Inno Setup 1.2.10 to 5.5.2.

innoextract is available under the ZLIB license - see the LICENSE file.

See the website for Linux packages.

Contact

Website

Author: Daniel Scharrer

Dependencies

• Boost 1.37 or newer
• liblzma from xz-utils (optional)
• iconv (either as part of the system libc, as is the case with glibc and uClibc, or as a separate libiconv)

For Boost you will need the headers as well as the iostreams, filesystem, date_time, system and program_options libraries. Older Boost version may work but are not actively supported. The boost iostreams library needs to be build with zlib and bzip2 support.

While the liblzma dependency is optional, it is highly recommended and you won't be able to extract most installers created by newer Inno Setup versions without it.

To build innoextract you will also need CMake 2.8 and a working C++ compiler, as well as the development headers for liblzma and boost.

The website might have more specific instructions for your Linux distribution.

Compile and install

To compile innoextract, run:

$ mkdir -p build && cd build && cmake ..
$ make

To install the binaries system-wide, run as root:

# make install

Build options:

• USE_LZMA (default: ON): Use liblzma if available.
• CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE (default: Release): Set to Debug to enable debug output.
• CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX (default: /usr/local on UNIX): Where to install innoextract.
• DEBUG_EXTRA (default: OFF): Expensive debug options
• MAN_DIR (default: share/man): Install location for man pages (relative to prefix).

Set options by passing -D<option>=<value> to cmake.

Run

To extract a setup file to the current directory run:

$ innoextract <file>

A list of available options can be retrieved using

$ innoextract --help

Documentation is also available as a man page:

$ man 1 innoextract

Limitations

• innoextract currently only supports extracting all the data. There is no support for extracting individual files or components and limited support for extracting language-specific files.

• Included scripts and checks are not executed.

• Data is always extracted to the current directory and the mapping from Inno Setup variables like the application directory to subdirectories is hard-coded.

• innoextract does not check if an installer includes multiple files with the same name and will continually overwrite the destination file when extracting.

• Names for data files in multi-file installers must follow the standard naming scheme.

• Encrypted installers are not supported.

A perhaps more complete, but Windows-only, tool to extract Inno Setup files is innounp.

Extracting windows installer executables created by programs other than Inno Setup is out of the scope of this project. Some of these can be unpacked by the following programs:

• cabextract

• unshield

Disclaimer

This project is in no way associated with Inno Setup or www.jrsoftware.org.