title: Programmatically extract contents of InstallShield setup.exe
body: <p>I am trying to extract the file-contents of an InstallShield setup.exe-file. (My plan is to use it in a back-office tool, so this must be done programmatically without any user interactions.)</p>
  
  <p>Is this possible?<br>
  (Initial research seems to indicate it will fail.)</p>
  
  <p>If it is possible to have a generic solution, for all recent versions of InstallShield that would be best.<br>
  Otherwise, if a solution only works for some versions of InstallShield it would be a step on the way. (It would probably be possible to deduce which InstallShield version a <code>setup.exe</code> is by looking at version  resources of the exe-file.</p>
  
  <p>I <a href="http://kb.flexerasoftware.com/doc/Helpnet/installshield12helplib/IHelpSetup_EXECmdLine.htm">found that</a> some InstallShield versions support <code>/b</code>  or <code>/extract_all</code>. However there is no good way of knowing, just launching the exe and hoping it will extract and terminate orderly rather then displaying GUI dialogs doesn't seem like a good solution. So I am therefore looking for a more stable way.<br>
  Ideas welcome.</p>