UnshieldV3

Extract InstallShield V3 (Z) archives.

About InstallShield v3 (Z) archives

InstallShield Z format is a compressed archive format used by version 3 of the InstallShield installation software.

Z files can be recognized by their magic marker: 13 5D 65 8C 3A 01 02 00.

Contained files are compressed with the "PKware implode" algorithm.

Usage

usage: 
  unshieldv3 help                        Produce this message
  unshieldv3 info ARCHIVE.Z              Show archive metadata
  unshieldv3 list [-v] ARCHIVE.Z         List ARCHIVE contents
  unshieldv3 extract ARCHIVE.Z DESTDIR   Extract ARCHIVE to DESTDIR

e.g.

$ ./unshieldv3 list -v NETSCAPE.1
Path                             Size  Date
----                             ----  ----
NHANDBK.ICO                       766  1995-06-12 12:17:56
HANDBK.ICO                        766  1995-06-12 12:17:48
NSCAPE16.TLB                     3728  1995-07-17 17:02:20
NAPLAYER.EXE                   149360  1995-06-30 15:51:12
NETSCAPE.EXE                  1353344  1996-03-08 21:24:34

Building

Requirements: GCC, cmake

cd build/
cmake ..
make

References

• Original proprietary (de)compressor: ICOMP95.EXE.
• Veit Kannegieser reverse-engineered the file format and wrote "stix" in a mixture of Pascal and x86 Assembly.
• Clean C implementation of the "implode" algo by Mark Adler.
• C# unpacker in OpenRA.
• C++ unpacker "isextract" by OmniBlade.
• Python unpacker "idecomp" by lephilousophe.

See also

Later InstallShield archives can be extracted with Unshield.

Authors

Licensed under Apache 2.0. © Wolfgang Frisch.

Contributors

• @OmniBlade
• @ligfx
• @adrium