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VIEWING AND EXTRACTING CAB FILES
Perhaps you know that Windows setup files (for installing
Windows on a computer) are compressed into files called
"Cab files". "Cab" is short for
"cabinet", and the file extension of each
cabinet file is ".CAB" If your Windows came on
a CD (or on 13 floppies), that is where you will normally
find the Cab Files. But you might also find them on your
computer's hard drive. A common location is a folder
named like this: Windows\Options\Cabs. How do you view
the list of files compressed into a Cab File? One way is
if you have downloaded and installed the Microsoft
PowerToys. (If you have the original version of Windows
98, you can also find them on your installation CD.)
There is a powertoy named CabView, which is installed
when you right-click on the file called Cabview.inf and
choose Install from the context menu that pops up. Once
you do this, Windows Explorer will treat Cab Files in a
way that is similar to how a normal folder is treated: if
you open a Cab File then its contents will be
displayed.You then extract a file simply by copying it
out of the Cab File.
If CabView is not available, you can open up an MS-DOS
Prompt window and type a version of the EXTRACT command
to display a Cab File's contents or to extract a single
file. The format for displaying a Cab File's contents is
this: EXTRACT /D cabinetfilename If you want to extract a
single file from Windows 9x Cabinet files:
EXTRACT /A /L destination cabinetfilename filename
In the above, "destination" is the folder where
you want to extract the file into (usually Windows or
Windows\System), and filename is the system file to be
extracted.
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