A command line tool to read, extract, search, create and verify MPQ files using the StormLib library

This is a command line tool, designed for automation. For example, run one command to create an MPQ file from a directory of files. If you require an MPQ tool with a graphical interface (GUI) - I would recommend using Ladik's MPQ Editor.

This project is for original World of Warcraft MPQ archives. This means is has been primarily authored for MPQ files used in the following World of Warcraft (WoW) versions: Vanilla (1.12.1), TBC (2.4.3) and WoTLK (3.3.5). It has only been tested on WoW MPQ archives/patches which use MPQ versions 1 or 2. No testing has been performed on other MPQ versions or archives from other games.

TODO.

• cmake
• C++ 17 compiler
• StormLib (provided as Git submodule)
• CLI11 (provided as GitSubmodule)

git clone --recursive https://github.com/TheGrayDot/mpqcli.git
cd mpqcli
cmake -B build
cmake --build build

The mpqcli binary will be available in: ./build/bin/mpqcli

The mpqcli program has the follwoing subcommands:

• version: Print the tool version number
• info: Print info about a target MPQ archive
• extract: Extract one/all files from a target MPQ archive
• create: Create an MPQ archive from a target directory (not implemented))
• add: Add a file to an existing MPQ archive (not implemented)
• list: List files in a target MPQ archive
• verify: Verify a target MPQ archive
• patch: Functionality to handle self-executable patch files

The output will be saved in a folder with the same name as the target MPQ file, without the extension.

mpqcli extract <target_mpq_file>

Extract files to a specific target directory - which will be created if it doesn't already exist.

mpqcli extract -o /path/to/target/directory <target_mpq_file>

Extract a single file using the -f option. If the target file in the MPQ archive is nested (in a directory) you need to include the full path. Similar to examples above, you can use the -o argument to specify the output directory.

mpqcli extract -f "InstallCD\Unpack\InstallLogTemplate\BaseHeader.html" <target_mpq_file>

Pretty simple, list files in an MPQ archive. Useful to "pipe" to other tools, such as grep (see below for examples).

mpqcli list <target_mpq_file>

The mpqcli tool has no native search feature - instead it is designed to be integrated with other, extenal 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 with exe in their name, which is then passed back to mpqcli extract. The result: search and extract all exe files.

mpqcli list <target_mpq_file> | grep ".exe" | xargs -I@ mpqcli extract -f "@" <target_mpq_file>

The following command lists all files in an MPQ archive, and each filename is filtered using grep - selecting files with exe in their name, which is then passed back to mpqcli extract. The result: search and extract all exe files.

mpqcli.exe list <target_mpq_file> | Select-String -Pattern ".exe" | ForEach-Object { mpqcli.exe extract -f $_ <target_mpq_file> }

The create subcommand has not yet been added.

The add subcommand has not yet been added.

TODO.

Extract an MPQ archive from a self-executable patch file (.exe), for example, a WoW executable patch (e.g., WoW-1.12.0.5595-to-1.12.1.5875-enUS-patch.exe).

mpqcli patch <target_exe_file>

Extract an MPQ archive from a patch file (e.g., .exe), and extract the preceeding data (as a .bin file).

mpqcli patch -b <target_exe_file>

This project requires the StormLib library. Many thanks to Ladislav Zezula for authoring such a good library and releasing the code under an open source licence. The StormLib library has a number of requirements. However, the build method specifies using the libraries bundled with StormLib.