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.

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.

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.