Registry Command Line API Tool
------------------------------
This progam is intended to fill a particular need. I needed to make the
wine registry look like it would have been if my application would have
been installed by its installation program. Since this was not possible I
took the following approach.
1 - Use regedit to export my full Windows registry before I install my
application.
2 - Use regedit to export my full Windows registry after I had install my
application.
3 - Generate the differences between the two image. What I obtain from the
diff is what I need to apply to the wine registry.
Obvisouly the process is not that straight forward to solve, first,
you don't get the diff between two Windows regedit exported .reg file by
doing a simple diff. What I had to do is a little more complex, but not
that much...
(Assuming that the registry picture files are
named ./before.reg and ./after.reg)
1 - Parse the before.reg and after.reg file into regFixer.pl, in order to
obtain lines in the form [HKEY\Sub1\Sub2\...\Subn]"Value"="Data"
(where "Data" can be prefixed by the type identifier : hex:, hex(0000000?)
or dword:)
2 - Generate the diff between the before.reg.fix and after.reg.fix
into app.diff
Now we have a app.reg file that contain what has been done by installing the
application. To this we extract the parts that we are interested in using
grep (and fix it with sed) and put that into app.added by example
( let's say we keep the added values only ).
At this point we know which registry entry to add to the wine registry. It
only remains to take the format we have and reset it into a format similar
to the one we get from regedit.
I say "similar" because there is a tiny difference between Windows regedit
export format and the format actually required by the tool.
The problem with this (and it is not a big one) is that regedit exports long
data streams onto many lines, and since I don't have tons of time I setup
another Perl script (regRestorer.pl) that fixes this (this could easily
be done in C obviously) (left as exercise ;-) ).
So, once you parsed app.added into regRestorer.pl you get an app.reg ready to
process by regapi.
So, this package comes with a few pieces:
regFixer.pl - Will convert the export of regedit
into something "diff-able"
regRestorer.pl - Will convert "cleaned" diff file into
something "regapi-able"
regSet.sh - Will do the procedure explained herein
for the added key only.
FAQ
---
Quick Start Guide
-----------------
1 - Get a snapshot of your windows registry in before.reg, (regedit/export)
2 - Install your application,
3 - Get a snapshot of your windows registry in after.reg.
4 - Invoke ./regSet.sh before.reg after.reg
Adding key I have in a regedit export file (nothing to diff with...)
------------------------------------------
1 - Invoke ./regSet.sh /dev/null myRegistry.reg
regapi help
-----------
1 - regapi has some sort of "man page like" help in it, simply invoke it
without any arguments.
Hope this is of any use to you.
Sylvain St-Germain.
bef8e16fdf