Question

When you right click on a .inf file you have an option to ‘Install’. I want to install a .inf file from the command line using a batch file. What is the ‘right’ way to do this?

Thanks!

[edit] I should clarify that I am trying to run this on Windows XP (and not Vista). Though I appriciate (and up-voted) the below answer mentioning InfDefaultInstall.exe, I believe that program was not shipped with XP.

Answer 1

You can find the command when looking at the HKCR\inffile\shell\Install\command registry key. On Windows XP this is

%SystemRoot%\System32\rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %1

on Windows Vista and later this would be

%SystemRoot%\System32\InfDefaultInstall.exe '%1'

To use the batch file across several Windows versions you would need some trickery. You could use reg.exe to query for the key and try parsing the output (I didn’t find a quick way of getting only the value from reg). If you know what platforms you’re running on you could also hard-code the command lines and switch according to the Windows version (which would need another hack to find that out. %OS% doesn’t tell you more than ‘Windows NT’, unfortunately.).