Inno Setup

Applications packaged with Inno Setup supports the /SILENT and /VERYSILENT switches (I'm not entirely sure on the difference between the two, as they appear to do the same thing)

setup.exe /VERYSILENT

You might get this dialog window asking if you want to continue installation:

Unattended XPCD

We can simply get around that using the following switch instead:

setup.exe /VERYSILENT /SP-

Some Inno Setup installers will attempt to open the program when setup completes, ISOBuster is one example of doing this. Again, we can simply overcome this by using an in-built utility in Windows XP known as Taskkill.

Below is an example of code you could use in a batch file to install an application that uses Inno Setup:

ECHO.
ECHO Installing ISOBuster 1.4
ECHO Please wait...
start /wait %systemdrive%\install\Applications\ISOBuster\IsoBuster14.exe /VERYSILENT /SP-
ECHO.
ECHO Killing ISOBuster.exe process
taskkill.exe /F /IM isobuster.exe
ECHO.


This works fine if you will only be installing on Windows XP systems as taskkill isn't available in Windows 98 or 2000. For Windows 98 and 2000 users you can download pskill.exe from the Sysinternals web site and include it in the same folder as Inno setup file. Then replace the taskkill.exe /F /IM isobuster.exe with "%~dp0pskill" isobuster.exe. Note that within a batch file %~dp0 expands to the drive letter and path of the batch file including the trailing backslash and I've included quotes around the command incase there is a space in the path.

Some Inno installers reboot the system. This can be prevented by using the /NORESTART option.
setup.exe /VERYSILENT /SP- /NORESTART

» How do I find out if a setup package is made by Inno Setup?

The first window that appears is usually the one shown above on this page, followed by the window shown below (click on the icon in the top-left to get a drop-down menu and click on About Setup)

Unattended XPCD

The following programs can be used to determine type of installer and the command line options.
USSF
CMenu

» How do I modify an application built with Inno?

For some Inno applications you will need to rebuild the installer to make it install silently.

The Inno installer is freeware so a user can easily repackage an Inno application if needed. To do this you need Inno Setup Unpacker to extract the files and Inno Setup to modify the install script and recompile the application. The documentation is included with the Inno Setup application.

Here is an example: Rebuilding Inno Setups, e.g. SpywareBlaster