Windows XP in a Nutshell

Name

File Expansion Utility — \windows\system32\expand.exe

Synopsis

Extract one or more compressed files from a cabinet (.cab) file.

To Open

Command Prompt → expand

Usage

expand -d source.cab [-f:files]
expand [-r] source.cab [destination]
expand [-r] source.cab [destination]
expand source.cab -f:files 
                     destination
                  

Description

A cabinet file is a compressed archive commonly used to package application installation files. The File Expansion Utility is used to extract files embedded in these cabinet files and takes the following options:

source.cab

The name of the cabinet (.cab) file from which to extract the files.

destination

The name of the folder in which to place the extracted files, a new filename to use for the extracted files, or a combination of the two. If using the -f option, destination is mandatory and must include a filename (with or without wildcards).

-d

Display (list) the contents of the specified cabinet file.

-r

Specify -r (recursive) without destination to extract all the files contained in the specified cabinet file. For example:

expand -r package.cab

Specify -r along with destination to rename the files according to the file specification included in destination. For example, the following extracts all the files in package.cab and renames their file extensions to .txt:

expand -r package.cab *.txt

-f: files

Use the -f option to specify one or more files to extract; use this if you don’t want to extract all the files from the cabinet file. For example, the following ...