About generate self-extracting exe with Winrar

Question

I have to admit that I have been blocked by this problem a couple of days.

It was started with that I was looking for a tool to generate an installation exe that could pack some programs developed by me and some third-part programs developed by others into one and it also could trigger a script after installation is completed. And, I tested a lot of MSI tools but all of them not good as Win-rar which has a feature called self-extracting to handle that. It works perfectly but in order to compatible with 32bit and 64bit operating system it generates two separated exe(s) that one for 32bit and another one for 64bit.

It makes no sense because all programs inside work well in both operating systems.

Is there possible to have only one self-extracting exe that works in both environments?

Thanks for reading this and with you all have a good day.

Answer 1

It is a little bit late 4 months after your question to answer it, but perhaps you are still interested in an answer.

If all applications packed into the SFX archive are 32-bit applications, it does not make sense to create a 64-bit SFX archive. The 32-bit SFX archive is enough to install the applications on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems.

Which version of WinRAR do have installed? 32-bit or 64-bit version?

What is the command line or the procedure you use to create the SFX archive?

For details about command line switches see text file Rar.txt in program files directory of WinRAR.

For details about SFX script commands open help of WinRAR, select tab Index, enter SFX and you see SFX commands with links to pages explaining all SFX script commands. All of them can be configured also using GUI of WinRAR.

It is possible to save all options set for creating the SFX archive in a compression profile for easy execution on creating a new SFX archive for an updated application.

Or you create a shortcut (*.lnk) to run WinRAR.exe or Rar.exe with appropriate switches and parameters to create the SFX archive always with the same settings for every new version of the application.