Pakgrep

What is pakgrep?

Pakgrep is a program that allows you to extract files from a Quake2 pak-file. For you that doesn't know what a pak-file is you could compare them with zip-files but for the game Quake2 instead. I.e. the pak files contains textures for game levels, skins for the models, sound for your models and maps. I could contain config files and background picture when showing the console. Pakgrep is written in C and supports regular expressions as search string.

Why pakgrep?

During all the years I played Quake2 I created a pak-file for myself which contained all goodies that I liked. I had nice textures, good sounds and our own ergo Gibbus background and a text font that I really liked. One day when I was re-installing Windows I did a mistake deleted my Quake2 folder by mistake. Not a big deal I thought until I realized that my pak-file was missing. I had a lot of pak-files backed up, but not my own. However it should be possible for me to recreate it again by copy and paste files from other pak-files. But to do that you had to open/extract every single pak-file, browse the extracted files and then decide if it was the file you were looking for. A quite time consuming task. I especially wanted to find the conchars.pcx file which contains the font showed in the game. I decided to create a small program that could extract the files and this is what it ended up with, i.e. pakgrep.

How to use it

  1. It is made for Windows and I have used it on WinXP (32) and Windows (64).
  2. Copy pakgrep.exe to a folder containing pak-files (*.pak).
  3. Type pakgrep.exe files_to_search_for pakfile.pak.

For example to search for and extract conchars.pcx files from pak9.pak you could write:

    pakgrep.exe conc* pak9.pak

On the pakfile I tried when writing this I got the following result

    c:\pakgrep>pakgrep.exe conc* pak9.pak
    Pakgrep v1.0 by Joakim Bech

    Extracting: pics/conback.pcx
    Extracting: pics/conchars.pcx

I.e. the search string matched both conback.pcx and conchars.pcx.

Download / info

Language: C

Source: Sorry, I will not publish source for this project.

Binary: pakgrep.exe (SHA1: 5c5150099d9e9d7d772ccb9b364a1267697f8463)

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