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 | xargs -I@ mpqcli extract -f "@" 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, which need to be escaped (due to how grep and xargs handles them). The following example extracts all dat files in the arr directory from the StarDat.mpq archive and handles escaping via sed.

$ mpqcli list -l scbw.txt StarDat.mpq | grep -i "arr\\\.*dat$" | sort | sed 's|\\|\\\\|g' | \
    xargs -I@ mpqcli extract -f "@" -k 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. The result: search and extract all exe files.

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