Installation of Advanced Registry Tracer (ART) with wpkg

I wanted to configure wpkg for a silent install of Advanced Registry Tracer (ART) from Elcomsoft. ART is a utility designed for analyzing changes made to the Windows Registry. I couldn't find any information on the developer's site or elsewhere on configuring it for a silent installation, so I looked at the setup.exe file with FileAlyzer. When I listed strings in the file, I saw "Nullsoft" and "NSIS", so I knew it used the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS).

That installer normally allows you to perform a silent install with the "/s" option and to specify the installation directory with the "/D=dir" option. So I put the following lines in the wpkg packages.xml file to install the software in "C:\Program Files\Utilities\SysMgmt\ART"

<package
  id="ART"
  name="Advanced Registry Tracer"
  revision="1"
  reboot="false"
  priority="1">

  <check type="uninstall" condition="exists" path="Advanced Registry Tracer" />
  <install cmd='\\server\wpkg\pkg\utilities\sysmgmt\advanced_registry_tracer\setup.exe 
    /S /D=%PROGRAMFILES%\Utilities\SysMgmt\ART'>
    <exit code="0" />
  </install>
  <remove cmd='"%PROGRAMFILES%\Utilities\SysMgmt\ART\uninstall.exe" /S' />
</package>

References:

1. Unattended, A Windows deployment system: Unattended/Silent Installation Switches for Windows Apps

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BASH Variables

Some useful variables available in the BASH shell.

• $$ = The PID number of the process executing the shell.
• $? = Exit status variable.
• $0 = The name of the command you used to call a program.
• $1 = The first argument on the command line.
• $2 = The second argument on the command line.
• $n = The nth argument on the command line.
• $* = All the arguments on the command line.
• $# The number of command line arguments.

Example:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
  echo "Usage: $0 filename"
else
  wc -l $1
fi

The script first checks for whether any argument has been entered on the command line, i.e. whether $# equals zero. If no arguments are present on the command line, the script prints a usage message. The $0 variable holds the name of the script itself. If an argument is entered on the command line, it is presumed to be a filename and the wc command is called to count the number of lines in the file.

So, if the script is named "example", and is called without any options, then the following output would be printed.

# ./example
Usage: ./example filename

If a filename is entered on the command line and that file has 21 lines in it, the following would be printed.

# ./example sample.txt
     21 sample.txt

References:

1. Linux Shell Programming

[/os/unix/bash] permanent link