Extracting files from an executable with the command prompt

Hello everybody. I have what I thought should be a relatively straightforward question: What do I type in the command prompt in Win7 to extract all the files from inside an .exe? I remember doing it once a long while back, but I forgot how and Google is being especially unhelpful.

One result instructed me to navigate to the file's location and type:

filename.exe /A /P C:\destinationfolder

but that didn't work. I assumed it was for an older Windows version. Google got its hit from a comment saying it didn't work on Win7... Can anybody help?

Most archive-related programs (i.e. 7zip, WinRAR, etc.) have a command-line capability. You can also use unzip.exe.

There is also the Microsoft self-extractor, see this page for description.

The usual way I do it is to use winrar or 7z (or whatever decompression utility you have installed). E.g. when I right click on an .exe I may get the option to extract files to... with winrar. But that doesnt work all the time. In that case try using Universal Extractor.

First of all, not all .exes have files that can be extracted. Only those .exes that are SEAs (self-extracting archives) have files to be extracted.

If you want to extract ALL of the files from an SEA the simplest method would be to simply execute the .exe which will do it's thing and extract all of the files within. If you wanted to extract only certain files from the SEA then I could see using some of the 3rd party apps previously suggested.

What happens when you simply try to run the .exe? It's possible that the SEA was created for an OS like Win95 or DOS and the embedded version of archiver won't run from within Win 7.

Are you sure the file you are trying to extract is an SEA?

Wow, thanks for all the responses guys. Strollin, it was a video driver .exe. There was no .zip version of the file available (at least, I didn't see one, even though there normally is), and I couldn't install it with a .exe version because my laptop is a Dell, and it only accepts Dell drivers despite those being much older than the Intel ones. They must be installed manually.

Anyway, WinRar was able to do it. I could have sworn there was a way to do it via the command prompt, though. Thank you for your help everyone :]

Old thread but wasn't answered....

skweebl said:

I could have sworn there was a way to do it via the command prompt, though. Thank you for your help everyone :]

Click to expand...

you are correct there is a way to do it via command line.
Found it here you go:

Ensure proper permissions are in place on the destination directory...

What I''ve used to extract adobe reader exe's for msi deployment. Hope it comes in handy to others out there.