Thread: File manipulation for creating an installer

  1. #1
    Registered User acolussi's Avatar
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    Lightbulb File manipulation for creating an installer

    Hi All.
    I'm quite a beginner in programming world, but I'm moving on with C/C++ programming, since I studied C++ for a while 10year ago for an university course and I found it very powerful.
    Now I'm working in a company where I need very often to customize a software distro (raw standard tree of files and directories), coonfiguring some files and directory for preparing the final customized configuration, which will be dedicated to a specific device. So the main "tree" has all the configurations I could use to configure it for all our devices and then I need to manual set file/directory for the specific machine. In brief I do:

    - Remove some directory from the base tree
    - Open some specific files (which have always the same name) to modify according to my needs their content
    - If I need to upgrade a previously "customized" version of my tree-files (since sometimes I just need to upgrade it), I download the present verision from the device, then I take the base tree of the latest release and set it as for a similar default device (as I'd have to do it for the first time) and finally I use Winmerge or ExamDiff for matching some specific files from the 2 trees, so to replicate the data from the present distro on the newer one, which lately I'll completely substitute to the old one on the device.

    Since I do this job very often, I think that there could be a way to automate it. Unfortunately, I'm still in a pre-phase of C learning, so I have never used a Visual programming IDE, but I'm still dealing with shell-running programs.

    I did some basis windows shell scripting, for creating a quick batch for opening or creating folders quickly, but I think that for the above job I should pass to a different approach... I'd like very much to stay on C/C++

    Any suggestion you can give me, I'll really appreciate it!

    Many thanks in advance to all the Cprogramming board community.


    Andrea C.

  2. #2
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Just use a setup and deployment project and forego creating your own installer. There are also commercial and open source build systems that will help you do what you want.

  3. #3
    Registered User acolussi's Avatar
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    Hi VirtualAce.
    Thank you very much for your quick reply. I took a look to Inno Setup and NSIS, but I think that they aren't the best way to do what I need, or better they would do it in case I'll learn Pascal or other scripting language different from C/C++. Moreover I some inputs to be achieved from user, like some specification about the custom configuration I'll pass to the program to define a specific selection of folders and files, plus a specific file manipulation. I know that Python or VBScript (or WSH... I didn't understand well the difference between them...?) they would help me better (if I would start learning them), but I'd like stay on C/C++... even thought it isn't be the best solution, I think.

    Thanks in advance for your help,


    Andrea C.

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