Find Hidden Command Line Silent Switches for Setup files

Installing a software seems easy. Just run the setup file, agree to license agreement, select destination location to install, confirm program's shortcut location, create desktop and tray icon, and finally install. It looked like many steps are involved but we usually just ignore all those and continue clicking next until the setup completes. Installing on one computer is not a problem but what if I am required to install on hundreds of computers? Am I going to go to each computer and do the steps over and over again? Of course not!



There are hidden command line switches in most installer or setup which I can use to bypass all those confirmation message boxes. Some software developer will include the command line switches in its documentation but some don’t. There is a way I know that can sniff and find the silent switch for most setup file.

Universal Silent Switch Finder is a little program that can automatically determine which silent switches can be used with a setup file. All you need to do is just load the setup file with USSF and it can tell what installer is being used to pack the files and the command line switches.

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If you’re still unsure of what I am talking about, I’ll do a test here. Let’s say I want to find the silent switches for the setup file hdtune_255.exe because I don’t want to keep on hitting the Next button as I need to install it on 20 computers.
1. Download the Universal Silent Switch Finder from the link at the end of this article and run it.
2. Click the > button which is at the same line as File and look for hdtune_255.exe.
3. Once loaded, it’ll take a few seconds to analyze the setup file and will give me the available silent command line switches. As you can see, USSF is able to tell that hdtune_255.exe is packed using Inno Setup package and I can use the command “hdtune_255.exe /VERYSILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES /NORESTART /SP-” to silently install HD Tune without going through the install wizard.

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Basically, Universal Silent Switch Finder uses PeID (Helper.bin) to identify the installer type and reports available switches accordingly. Instead of us checking what is the installer being used and trying to find information on them, we can just use USSF.


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