I'm wanting to distribute a piece of GPL'ed software with some software I'm doing. It comes in an installer, but I'd like to embed it into one of my installers. There is little documentation about the changes it makes to the registry/ini files upon installation. I was wondering if you guys knew of any software that would monitor changes to the disk, registry and ini files from an installer, that way I could make my own script in Wise.

I'd look at regmon and filemon and set the filters to avoid getting everything that happens logged... But that is because I know of no better/more specialized tool for this.

Filemon probably won't directly tell you changes made to files (unless you dig through the exact content of all calls) but if you can make multiple installs, you can first locate which files that are touched, then in a second run document the files before/after installation. Regmon should tell you what gets added/modified...

/Michael

Thanks! much appreciated.

Reverse-engineering third party installers is a big part of my job, so I've got a lot of experience with this.

It's not enough just to monitor the system registry. To really do it right you need to prep a few things and use certain tools. I have a rather complicated procedure I use that involves creating a fresh image of a clean version of the lowest-common-denominator OS in question, and then using the "In Control" utility to monitor file and registry access. But that's not all of it, you have to know, for example, which registry entries are there because a DLL was self-registered, and then use your own code to self-register the DLL in question.

I don't know how "perfect" this particular project of yours needs to be, but if it needed to be really perfect (in other words, the installer needs to work for sure on any computer in the world because you don't control its distribution), then contact me on ICQ and I'll see what I can do to help you directly with the process.

GPL'ed software with some software I'm doing. It comes in an installer

Dunno if the terms of the GPL require it, but have you checked to see if the source for the installer script is available?