Article The Complete Guide to MSI Switches for Silent Software Installation. Ever wonder what really goes on during a software installationA collection of Command Line Switches and arguments to control some program executables. On this page I will collect command line switches for some program executables. Hey everybody I have a program that silently installs Adobe Reader 9. 4 and it works wonderfully, but when I upgrade it to install Adobe Reader X the. Hi to all, I need to print PDF file directly from command line in Acrobat Reade XI I have used h t switches, but now it is wrong. Anyone does know. When you click Next, Next, Finish, what really happens under the covers while you watch that progress bar slowly creep from left to right The reality is probably far less interesting than youd think. At its core, a software installation is little more than a really big file copy, along with a set of registry changes. Indeed some installations perform special activities like installing drivers or registering Active. X controls. But at the end of the day, even these special activities are still not much more than file copies and registry updates. I wrote an article for this site not long ago titled. In that article, I talked about some of the ways to automate this process. In every way, one of the biggest tasks is in getting that software installation to run silently. In a silent installation, everything that happens after you initiate the installer occurs without interactively prompting the user. Some dialog boxes might pop up, but theyll disappear on their own. In your example RebootYesNo is a private property. Private properties cannot be passed via a command line. You would need to use a transform to set RebootYesNo. List of Chromium Command Line Switches. There are lots of command lines which can be used with the Google Chrome browser. Some change behavior of features, others are. Eliminating anything that requires the user to enter data or click a button is what makes a silent installation so powerful for automating software installation. That power comes in distributing software through an automated tool. Many of such tools exist on the market today, including one thats built directly into Active Directory Group Policy. Using Group Policy Software Installation or any of the other solutions in combination with a silenced installation, you can fully eliminate all the time consuming manual steps required for handling your users software. Todays software installations are most commonly distributed with one of two file extensions. Silencing the first, those with. EXE extensions, tends to be a slightly more challenging process. EXE based installations do not have a universal switch structure for sending instructions to the installer as it goes about an installation. Installations with the other file extension, MSIs, tend to be much easier. Thats the case because MSI based software installations all share in a universal switch structure. Sending instructions to an MSI based software installation requires learning only a single syntax. That syntax looks generally like this msiexec. NAMEValueMSI Switches, the Guide. Let me first spend a minute breaking down what youre seeing in the string above. Commands to the Windows Installer service are invoked with msiexec. This command can similarly be used for patching or uninstalling software as well. q This second switch instructs the installer not to show its graphical user interface during the installation. This is the most important switch for instructing an installation to run silently. l logfile. This third optional switch tells the installer to log everything to the file found at logfile. You can insert a full path into logfile. While this switch is functionally optional, the log file data it produces becomes invaluable in troubleshooting an installation that doesnt complete correctly. Since the installation is silenced, the data in this log file often contains the only clues youll ever get about what problems the installation is experiencing. i setup. This fourth switch points Windows Installer to the MSI file that contains the software you want to install. The contents of setup. UNC path. This UNC path support is extremely useful, because it enables you to store your software installation files on a file server somewhere and invoke them over the network. NAMEValue This fifth and final switch is the most challenging of all. While every MSI leans on a universal structure for sending commands to the Windows Installer, every installation is obviously different. Installing Adobe Acrobat, for example, requires an entirely different set of questions than does installing Microsoft Exchange. This final switch identifies those specific characteristics that are unique to each MSI installation by name and value, and enables you to set them at the command line. You can think of NAMEValue as your means for supplying the answers to the installers questions before it asks for them. So, for example, if you wanted to install the Adobe Flash Player to your desktop and had the correct MSI available, you might do so with the following syntax msiexec. InstallFlashPlayer1. ActiveX. msi REBOOTYESNONo. But wait a minute That command line above contains all the universal switches one might expect, except it ends with this fairly non standard REBOOTYESNONo switch thats standing in for NAMEValue. Where did that come from Sleuthing for Custom Properties. As I mentioned earlier, each MSI has its own custom name and value pairs that answer questions the installation requires. Those pairs might identify an install folder, or add a license key, or in this case instruct the installer to prevent a post installation reboot. The hard part with these name and value pairs, as you can surmise, is in discovering what they actually are. MSI in all its universal configuration amazingness does not have a simple way of interrogating an installation to identify its custom namevalue pairs. One published method to do this requires downloading the Orca database editor from Microsoft. This database editor has the ability to peer into an MSI to identify its characteristics. It can also edit those characteristics as a highly advanced function, although doing so is an exceedingly complex activity. In fact, even getting the Orca software requires multiple steps. Youll first need to download the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and. NET Framework 4. Once downloaded, install the SDKs debugging tools. Youll find Orca, which is itself a separate installation, in Program FilesWindows SDK7. BinOrca. msi. Double click this file to install it to your management desktop. Figure 1 Adobe Flash Players MSI inside Orca. Once within Orca, you can open an MSI and peer around to locate its custom settings. Take a look at Figure 1 where youll see that the installflashplayer1. Remember that MSIs are above all big databases of content and configurations that apply files to disk drives and keys and values to registries. Orca exposes these databases for what they really are. Inside every MSI is a table called Property. That table identifies all the properties that are tagged to an installation. The name and value pairs discussed above are in fact properties along with their values as seen in Orca. Figure 1 shows a the Reboot. Yes. No property thats configured in the Flash Player MSI installation by whomever created the install. Its value defaults to Yes. By setting REBOOTYESNONo, you are effectively telling the installation to go about its business with every default property intact, except the one for REBOOTYESNO. For this one, change its value to No. Just about any property you see in this table can be adjusted at the command line as you execute msiexec to kick off an installation. While this method is the comprehensive approach, it is also the time consuming approach. It also requires a bit of sleuthing to determine what propertyvalue combinations will ultimately net you the result you need. Another alternative is to simply search the Internet for clues that others have found. A popular website that contains installation hints for many common software packages is www.
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January 2018
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