Automate Self-Extractor

I am a little new to programming so please bear with me. I create a lot of self-extractors that I upload to a ftp site which my clients then download (with the self-extractor putting the files I zipped up to the right spot). I am trying to automate this process on my end since it is rather repetitive.

I think I can figure out how to create the zip and how to upload the file once created but I cannot figure out how to create use winzip se to cre开发者_运维知识库ate a self-extractor from the created zip file. WinZip has a command line interface but WinZIp SE apparently does not.

Any help would be appreciated...I am planning on writing this code in java btw.

Thanks.

According to What are the differences between the full WinZip Self-Extractor and the Personal Edition version?

Self-extracting files can be created from the command line.

That being said, I'm not sure I would use Java to automate the tasks you are describing, it's not the best tool for that IMHO. I'd rather use shell scripting.

Update: (answering a comment from the OP) I'm really not a Windows specialist but I think that Windows PowerShell might be appropriate for the job (and it can be used to query a MS Access database).

If you need to compress and decompress zip archives, just use any other command line utility, which you will call from your Java app. For example zip, and unzip: http://www.info-zip.org/

7-zip is free and can do this on the command line, meaning you can make a batch script. 7za a -sfx MySelfExtractingzip.exe MyFolderContainingFiles/