Question : Shell versus Double-Click

I've got a Microsoft Access databse I want people to be able to install and use. By install, I mean that the back end is pointing to an Oracle Database. So, packaged in a folder with the database is a copy of the Oracle instant client 11. Now, the only available way for me to distribute the file was to put it in an archive file (used Winrar), break it into pieces, and set up a self-extractor, which I did.  I set up another database (much smaller), to download the pieces from a location, put them back together and do the rest of the setup.

When I click on the executable file, I want it to pull the folders and files out and put them in the same location as the executable. When I physically double-click the file, it works perfectly. But, when I try to use Shell or the ShellWait Code (that I found here), it doesn't work. I can see the process start running in the task manager, but the files never show up. Any thoughts?

FYI - I'm also trying to get the code to keep running after the extraction is done...which is why shellwait seemed like a good solution.

Answer : Shell versus Double-Click

It is probably a path issue. If it is running, but nothing is happening. It is looking for the path and can't find it. Be careful to use quotes and chr(34) where quotes are requred. If there are any spaces in your file path and you haven't appropriately sanitized the path, you won't get it to download anything.

Just out of curiosity, have you though about just using a batch file to install and using wget to download everything you need for the initial installation?

For that matter, you could use a vbs script that a user could click on, which would launch a series of wget commands to get the relevent files, and then wait for downloads to complete before doing the rest of the install. That's how we do stuff.