Visual COBOL Installation Options

To see what parameters you can use, execute the following from the command line:

install-file /help

where install-file for the following products is as follows:

Visual COBOL: vce_100.exe

See the Examples section further in this topic for examples of some of the parameters you can use.

Directory considerations

You must have read and write access for every directory accessed during the installation.
You can override the default installation folder using the InstallFolder parameter.

Installing creates a group of log files prefixed Micro_Focus_ in the %temp% folder, by default. To change the location or name, use the /log parameter on your Setup command line and specify the path and file name, for example:
```
/log drive:\path\LogFilename
```

Skipping installation of the Microsoft package dependencies

A standard installation downloads and installs the latest versions of the Microsoft Build Tools (for Visual Studio 2017) and the Windows 10 SDK packages to their default locations. Using the following option, you can skip installation of these packages, thus reducing the footprint and duration of the installation. See Microsoft Package Dependencies to see if you can safely skip installing these packages.

vce_100.exe skipmstools=1

Offline installations

An offline installation is one where the client running an install is not connected to the internet; the problem this presents is that the installer cannot download and install certain file and package dependencies; see Microsoft Package Dependencies. In such circumstances, an administrator (or at least someone connected to the internet) must download and make any dependencies available on the local network beforehand.

To prepare an offline installation, the administrator should run their own (online) installation using the downloadmstools parameter: this downloads the package dependencies to <directory>, which should be a fully-qualified path to a location accessible to the client when they run an installation.

start /wait vce_100.exe /q downloadmstools=<directory>

A client can then run an offline installation by pointing their installer at the location of the packages:

vce_100.exe installmstools=<directory>

This command runs a full product install; during which it uses the locally-accessible <directory> to install the package dependencies.

Installing silently

You can install Micro Focus products silently by specifying /q at the command line and using command line parameters to specify the installation directory (installfolder=path), user information, and which features to install. You must execute the command with superuser permissions.

start /wait install-file.exe /q [parameters]

Examples

To silently install Visual COBOL into a directory other than the default:
```
start /wait vce_100.exe /q InstallFolder=c:\DirectoryName
```
If you want to silently install the Eclipse IDE in a location other than the default, execute:
```
start /wait vce_100.exe /q InstallFolder2=c:\EclipseInstallDirectory
```