To view some simple examples for WIC.EXE's usage, type wic -ha on the command line.

This page will show you how to use the advanced command line options of WIC.EXE, whose usage might not be obvious. Assume that you wish to create an archive containing two packages, one for the language-independent stuff (called "Program") and one for the National Language Support (called "NLS", containing resources and documentation). Further assume that your program is called PROGRAM.EXE and loads an NLS DLL at startup, which holds language-dependent PM resources.

The easiest way to achieve this is to create two temporary directories on your disk, one for each package, called, say, PROGRAM and NLS. Into each directory, place the files as they would later be unpacked onto the user's hard disk (even if the target directories for both packages will later be the same). Example:

 TEMP
   +-- PROGRAM (language-independent package, index 1)
   |     +-- BIN   (Files: PROGRAM.EXE)
   |     +-- CONFIG (Files: PROGRAM.CFG, config text file)
   |
   +-- NLS (National Language Support package, index 2)
         |         (Files: README.TXT)
         +-- BIN   (Files: PROG001.DLL -- PM NLS resources)
         +-- HELP  (Files: PROG001.INF, PROG001.HELP)
Now place your installation script (called, say, PROGRAM.WIS) into the parent TEMP directory. To create an archive called PROGRAM.WPI, change to the TEMP directory and type:

wic program.wpi 1 -cprogram -r * 2 -cnls -r * -s program.wis

This will create the two packages in PROGRAM.WPI, changing to PROGRAM and NLS before packing the files, respectively, and recursing into the subdirectories. In the script, you should specify the same target directory for the two packages and set the BASE attribute with the PCK element, so that both packages will always be in the same target directory. The user will then get three subdirectories in the target path, called BIN, CONFIG and HELP, and the README.TXT file would be in the target directory itself.

This is basically how I create the XWorkplace archive myself, for example. To automate this process, I have created a few batch files which automatically create those temporary directories, copy the files which have been rebuilt to the proper locations, and call WIC.EXE, so I won't accidentally forget a file in the archive.