Advanced examples

Search and extract files on Linux

The mpqcli tool has no native search feature - instead, it is designed to be integrated with other, external operating system tools. For example, mpqcli list can be “piped” to grep in Linux or Select-String in Windows PowerShell to perform searching.

The following command lists all files in an MPQ archive, and each filename is filtered using grep - selecting files ending in .exe (note: . is a regex wildcard matching any character; use \.exe for a strictly literal match) - which is then passed back to mpqcli extract. The result: search and extract all exe files.

$ mpqcli list wow-patch.mpq | grep -i \.exe | mpqcli extract wow-patch.mpq -
[*] Extracted: Launcher.exe
[*] Extracted: BackgroundDownloader.exe
[*] Extracted: WoW.exe
[*] Extracted: BNUpdate.exe
[*] Extracted: Repair.exe
[*] Extracted: WowError.exe

Note that directories are specified with backslashes. The names reach mpqcli extract on stdin unchanged, so only the backslash in the grep pattern needs escaping. The following example extracts all dat files in the arr directory from the StarDat.mpq archive, keeping the folder.

$ mpqcli list -l scbw.txt StarDat.mpq | grep -i 'arr\\.*dat$' | sort | mpqcli extract StarDat.mpq -
[*] Extracted: arr/flingy.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/images.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/mapdata.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/orders.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/portdata.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/sfxdata.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/sprites.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/techdata.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/units.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/upgrades.dat
[*] Extracted: arr/weapons.dat

Search and extract files on Windows

The following command lists all files in an MPQ archive, and each filename is filtered using Select-String - selecting files ending in .exe (note: . is a regex wildcard matching any character; use \.exe for a strictly literal match) - which is then passed back to mpqcli extract on stdin. ForEach-Object Line passes on the text of each match rather than the match object. The result: search and extract all exe files.

PS> mpqcli.exe list wow-patch.mpq | Select-String -Pattern \.exe | `
    ForEach-Object Line | mpqcli.exe extract wow-patch.mpq -
[*] Extracted: Launcher.exe
[*] Extracted: BackgroundDownloader.exe
[*] Extracted: WoW.exe
[*] Extracted: BNUpdate.exe
[*] Extracted: Repair.exe
[*] Extracted: WowError.exe