Thursday, October 21, 2010

Mailbag: How to perform a silent install of the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable packages

Question:
You previously posted lists of command line switches to perform silent and unattended installations of the Visual C++ 2005 redistributable and the Visual C++ 2008 redistributable.  How can I perform silent and unattended installations of the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable?
Answer:
The Visual C++ 2010 redistributable packages (vcredist_x86.exe, vcredist_x64.exe and vcredist_ia64.exe) support the following command line installation options.
The examples below use the file named vcredist_x86.exe, but you can substitute the x64 or ia64 versions of the EXEs with equivalent command lines to achieve the same behavior for them as well.
Silent install
This option will suppress all UI and perform an install.
<full path>\vcredist_x86.exe /q /norestart
For example, if you download vcredist_x86.exe to a folder named c:\vc2010redist, then the command line would look like this:
c:\vc2010redist\vcredist_x86.exe /q /norestart
Unattended install
This option will display a progress dialog (but requires no user interaction) and perform an install.
<full path>\vcredist_x86.exe /passive /norestart
For example, if you download vcredist_x86.exe to a folder named c:\vc2010redist, then the command line would look like this:
c:\vc2010redist\vcredist_x86.exe /passive /norestart
Silent repair
This option will suppress all UI and perform a repair.
<full path>\vcredist_x86.exe /q /repair /norestart
For example, if you download vcredist_x86.exe to a folder named c:\vc2010redist, then the command line would look like this:
c:\vc2010redist\vcredist_x86.exe /q /repair /norestart
Silent uninstall
This option will suppress all UI and perform an uninstall.
<full path>\vcredist_x86.exe /q /uninstall /norestart
Read more: Aaron Stebner's WebLog