What's the best way to create a .cab file of multiple files quickly?

Question

I would like to make a .cab file of multiple files. Any tutorial or guide I've come across is only useful for a few files.

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia:

The CAB file format may employ the following compression algorithms:

• DEFLATE – invented by Phil Katz, the author of the ZIP file format
• Quantum compression – licensed from David Stafford, the author of the Quantum archiver
• LZX – invented by Jonathan Forbes and Tomi Poutanen, given to Microsoft when Forbes joined the company

As such, any .zip compressor should open the file, even the one that's native with all recent Windows versions.

However, and as the article indicates, there are few archivers that create .cab files, due to their format. According to the following list these programs can write .cab files:

• ZipGenius
• AlZip
• IZArc
• PowerArchiver
• TugZip
• WinAce

Answer 2

You can use the Windows built-in command makecab but first you need to generate a file list.

dir C:\FolderName /s /b /a-d > c:\temp\files.txt

This will list all files in the C:\FolderName directory and save as a text file with full path name. Now we are going to use the files.txt file to create the cab file.

makecab /d CabinetName1=test.cab /D DiskDirectoryTemplate=C:\temp /f c:\temp\files.txt

The above command will generate a test.cab file in your C:\Temp folder using the file list generated earlier.

Additional helpful reference: Microsoft Cabinet Reference. and makecab.exe details.

Answer 3

I needed to create a CAB file in a hurry for a project last week. What I really wanted to do was to replace a single file inside an existing CAB file, preserving the folder structure in the CAB. I soon learned that there was no simple 7Zip or WinZip way to do this in place, and that the success path was to generate a new CAB file with the modified files I wanted in it. This tool to create a CAB file from all files in a folder worked beautifully for me. It is a GUI front end to the MakeCab utility that creates It is described here: https://yieldreturnpost.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/free-tool-to-create-cab-file-from-folder/ The GitHub source is here: https://github.com/sapientcoder/CabMaker

First, I used the Expand command to extract the files from the existing CAB file to a folder structure.

expand -F:* \\MyServer\ServerMigration2020\ExportedConfigurationSourceFiles\MyOriginalCABFile.cab \\MyServer\CaptureSV\ServerMigration2020\Cabfiles\CabSourceFiles 

This Expand command extracted all the files inside my CAB file and placed them in the folder CabSourceFiles, preserving the folder structure.

Now, we are ready to run the CabMaker GUI to create our CAB file. Note that this is a "plain" CAB file of just files and folders, not one that has extra headers and such as part of a set of installer files.

I simply downloaded the CabMaker C# code and ran it in Visual Studio 2019. Up came the GUI. I entered my Source folder (the output folder in the Expand command), and my Target folder (where the resulting CAB file gets placed), and my desired CAB file name, and clicked the "Make CAB" button, and it ran. The resulting CAB file worked beautifully, and imported successfully into the app and resulted in a correctly set configuration.

OK, so why did I need to make a CAB file? Well, we were migrating a vendor app from an old server to a new server, and using the app's "export" function to capture current state configuration files that we could "import" into the app on the new server. the alternative was to use the clunky GUI of the consumer app to manually navigate around and make a couple hundred changes to file and folder names that had changed. I decided it would be better to make the file and folder changes in the XML file within the CAB that held all the settings. It all worked out beautifully on server cutover day; sometimes we get lucky. Major kudos to GitHub contributor SapientCoder!