How to tell which program is used to create a setup.exe file

Question

I have a program whose install I'm trying to automate with a batch file, the problem is that I don't know what program is used to make the setup file and thus I am unsure of what command line switches are available.

How can I acquire this information? If it's any help this is the icon:

http://www.optikvervelabs.com/vph/Images/setupIcon.gif

Update: Universal Extractor marks it as "Microsoft Visual C++ v6.0 DLL [Overlay] *" 7zip can open it, contents are:

• .text
• .rdata
• .data
• .rsrc
• CERTIFICATE
• [data-1]

I can't see anything that looks like command line switches though.

P.S. Sorry to remove the image tag, won't let me update otherwise.

Answer 1

2 ways spring to mind. First is to run it with the /? command-line option. That might give you a list of available command-line switches.

Second way is to grab a copy of 7-zip and try to extract it. It might be the case that the setup.exe you have is a self-extracting archive (many are), so doing this will give you access to the files inside it. You may even get lucky and find that there's an MSI in there, which would really make your job easier.

Answer 2

You don't say, but I'm assuming Windows.

There is a program here called "strings" that will let you see the text in a file. Often you can use that to see things like the command line switches if progname /? doesn't help. You can run it like this:

strings progname.exe

It will show most of the text in the file, so you may have to look through quite a bit of both junk and stuff that's of no interest before you see what you're looking for (if it's even there).