NAME¶

wimupdate - Update a WIM image

SYNOPSIS¶

wimupdate WIMFILE [IMAGE] [OPTION...] [< CMDFILE]

DESCRIPTION¶

wimupdate, or equivalently wimlib-imagex update, modifies the specified IMAGE in the Windows Imaging (WIM) archive WIMFILE by adding, deleting, or renaming files or directories in it.

IMAGE specifies the image in WIMFILE to update. It may be the 1-based index of an image or the name of an image. It may be omitted if WIMFILE contains only one image. You can use wiminfo(1) to list the images contained in WIMFILE.

The modifications to perform on the WIM image are specified as a sequence of commands, one per line, read in a text file (UTF-8 or UTF-16LE encoded; plain ASCII is also fine) from standard input. It is recommended that standard input be redirected from a file (CMDFILE), as shown above, rather than typing in commands interactively. Alternatively, to specify a command directly on the command line, see the --command option.

AVAILABLE COMMANDS¶

This section documents the commands that may appear in the CMDFILE described above.

OPTIONS¶

The following options are accepted on the command line by wimupdate itself:

--dereference

Use --dereference for all add commands.

--unix-data

Use --unix-data for all add commands.

--no-acls

Use --no-acls for all add commands.

--strict-acls

Use --strict-acls for all add commands.

--no-replace

Use --no-replace for all add commands.

--config=FILE

Set the capture configuration file for all add commands. See the description of this option to wimcapture(1).

--force

Use --force for all delete commands.

--recursive

Use --recursive for all delete commands.

--check

Before updating the WIM, verify its integrity if it contains extra integrity information. Also include extra integrity information in the updated WIM even if it was not present before.

--include-integrity

Include extra integrity information in the updated WIM, i.e. like --check but don't also verify the WIM beforehand.

--threads=NUM_THREADS

Number of threads to use for compressing newly added files. Default: autodetect (number of processors).

--rebuild

Rebuild the entire WIM rather than appending the updated data to the end of it. Rebuilding the WIM is slower, but will save a little bit of space that would otherwise be left as a hole in the WIM file.

See wimoptimize(1) for a more customizable way of rebuilding (and optionally recompressing) a WIM file. If running wimoptimize after wimupdate, there is no need to specify --rebuild to wimupdate.

--command=STRING

Instead of reading update commands from standard input, read a single update command directly from the string STRING specified on the command line. This option cannot be provided more than one time and cannot be used to specify more than one update command. Note that the STRING, as well as any paths containing spaces within the STRING must be appropriately quoted. If running from cmd.exe on Windows, you should use double quotes for the outer quotes and single quotes for the inner quotes. Example:

This option is provided for convenience only. Do not execute wimupdate multiple consecutive times, each time passing the --command option! This is inefficient. Instead, generate an update command file and provide it (on standard input) to a single invocation of wimupdate, as explained in this document.

--wimboot-config=FILE

If this option is specified, no commands shall be read from standard input, and instead the following command shall be executed:

add FILE /Windows/System32/WimBootCompress.ini

This sets FILE as the WIMBoot configuration file for the image. The [PrepopulateList] section of this file specifies path globs that shall not be extracted as WIMBoot pointer files (perhaps due to being needed early in the boot process). See the documentation for the --wimboot option of wimapply(1) for more information.

--unsafe-compact

Compact the WIM archive in-place and append any new data, eliminating "holes". This is efficient, but in general this option should not be used because a failed or interrupted compaction will corrupt the WIM archive. For more information, see the documentation for this option in wimoptimize(1).

--ref="GLOB"

File glob of WIM(s) on which the delta WIM is based. Updating split WIMs is not allowed, but updating delta WIMs is allowed. When updating a delta WIM, the WIM(s) on which the delta WIM is based should be specified using this option. (It isn't a hard requirement, but it's needed for data deduplication to work fully and for the TOTALBYTES statistic to be correctly updated.)

NOTES¶

wimupdate can be viewed as redundant with wimmountrw, since a WIM image can also be updated by mounting it read-write. However, wimupdate works on all platforms including Windows, whereas wimmountrw only works on Linux.

Symbolic links inside a WIM image are not dereferenced when being interpreted. So, for example, if you have a WIM image that contains a symbolic link "/Documents and Settings" -> "/Users" where "/Users" is a directory, then a subdirectory named "Public" in this directory must be specified as "/Users/Public" rather than "/Documents and Settings/Public".

All paths to files or directories within the WIM image must be specified relative to the root of the image. However, the leading slash is optional, and both forward slashes and backslashes are accepted. In addition, on Windows, the paths are by default treated case-insensitively, while on UNIX-like systems, the paths are by default treated case-sensitively. The default case sensitivity may be changed by setting the WIMLIB_IMAGEX_IGNORE_CASE environmental variable to 0 or 1.

The command file (CMDFILE) is parsed by wimupdate itself and not by the system shell. Therefore, its syntax is limited. However, comment lines beginning with '#' are allowed, and it is also possible to quote arguments with whitespace inside them.

On UNIX-like systems, you cannot use wimupdate to add files to an image directly from an NTFS volume using libntfs-3g, even though wimcapture supports capturing a full image this way.

Except when using --unsafe-compact, it is safe to abort a wimupdate command partway through; however, after doing this, it is recommended to run wimoptimize to remove any data that was appended to the physical WIM file but not yet incorporated into the structure of the WIM, unless --rebuild was specified, in which case you should delete the temporary file left over.

EXAMPLES¶

All the examples below show the update command file to be created as well as the wimupdate command to run to perform the updates.

Delete two files from a WIM image:

delete /setup.exe
delete /sources/setup.exe

Add some files and directories to a WIM image. Note that the first path of each add command specifies the files to add, while the second path of each add command specify the locations at which to add them inside the WIM image:

add somedir     /dir
add somefile    /dir/file

Rename a file inside a WIM image.

rename /dir_in_wim/oldfile.txt /dir_in_wim/newfile.txt

Using additional features, such as comments, options, and overlays, and including extra integrity information in the updated WIM:

#
# This file specifies some changes to make to a WIM image.
#
# Add a new directory containing files I want in the image.
# The quotes are necessary because the directory name
# contains a space.
add "My Directory" "/My Directory"
# Add the contents of "Another Directory" to the
# "/My Directory" we just created in the WIM image.  Since
# the destination path already exists, this performs an
# overlay.
add "Another Directory" "/My Directory"
# Rename some file for some reason.
rename /dir_in_wim/oldfile.txt /dir_in_wim/newfile.txt
# Delete an unwanted directory.
delete --recursive /Users/Me/Documents/Junk

SEE ALSO¶

wimlib-imagex(1) wimcapture(1) wiminfo(1) wimmountrw(1) wimoptimize(1)