Creating an installation task for a new EXE installer

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There are tons of examples of installing EXEs silently here: http://bigfix.me/

There are different installer types for different EXEs with different silent installer switches. For some programs, you need to know more than just the normal silent install switch, but also how to specify some required parameters as well.

Most EXE installers are of a few different types and once you know the type, then you should be able to figure out the silent install switches for that type of installer.

Your first step should always be to figure out how to silently install the software from the command prompt, not from the debugger or task or BAT file. Once you figure out the command line options needed, then you should be able to replicate that in a task using actionscript waithidden.

If I am working with a new EXE installer and I do not know the type, I upload it to https://www.virustotal.com/ and it will give me an analysis of the file, which typically includes the type. If I cannot upload it to https://www.virustotal.com/ due to size or security reasons, then I use TrID, ExifTool, or hachoir_metadata.

Example:

Here is an open source alternative to CCleaner that has a command line interface:
http://katana.oooninja.com/bleachbit/sf/BleachBit-1.6-setup.exe

I didn’t know the installer type, so I uploaded it to virus total:
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/935ece8fa5c9bb5f449d6994c7a98d390213bad429466ffa28c06438ed9dad09/analysis/#item-detail

In the virus total analysis, it mentions NSIS, which is the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System:

I then looked up the silent install switches for NSIS based EXE installers, which is /S
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Docs/Chapter3.html#installerusagecommon

I was then able to construct a complete task for installing BleachBit using BigFix: http://bigfix.me/fixlet/details/6079

Documentation

Here are some helpful links to command line switches for different installer types:

Examples

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