Extracting Icons from Windows Apps

I have a few games I play through Wine, and none of them come with their icons as seperate .ico files. As creative as I think not, using the generic linux icons is boring.

Thankfully, there is a tool in linux to extract icons from .exe files, namely icotools. Here’s a guide how to extract icons from .exe files.

• Get icotools through package manager:
• wajig install icoutils
• Within here is two tools, icotool and wrestool. A whatis for both describes them as:

icotool (1) - Convert and create Win32 icon and cursor files
wrestool (1) - extract resources from Microsoft Windows(R) binaries

• In my case, they are both binaries, so I want wrestool this time
• cd into the directory of the Windows app.
• The rest pretty much comes straight from the man wrestool but here’s the low down:
• To list all icons in the file type:
• wrestool -l --type=group_icon Win32.exe
• Extract all icons to current directory, naming the destination files `write.exe_T_N.ico’:
• wrestool -x --output=. -t14 Win32.exe
• See what’s extracted:
• ls -l *.ico; and you should see:
• Win32.exe_14_1.ico