icoextract

icoextract is an icon extractor for Windows PE files (.exe/.dll), written in Python. It also includes a thumbnailer script (exe-thumbnailer) for Linux desktops.

This project is inspired by extract-icon-py, icoutils, and others.

icoextract aims to be:

• Lightweight
• Portable (cross-platform)
• Fast on large files

Installation

Installing from source

You can install the project via pip: pip3 install icoextract[thumbnailer]

On Linux, you can activate the thumbnailer by copying exe-thumbnailer.thumbnailer into the thumbnailers directory:

• /usr/local/share/thumbnailers/ if you installed icoextract globally
• ~/.local/share/thumbnailers if you installed icoextract for your user only

The thumbnailer should work with any file manager that implements the Freedesktop Thumbnails Standard: this includes Nautilus, Caja, Nemo, Thunar (when Tumbler is installed), and PCManFM. KDE / Dolphin uses a different architecture and is not supported here.

Distribution packages

icoextract is packaged in these repositories:

• Arch Linux AUR: icoextract
• Debian (11+): icoextract
• Ubuntu (21.10+): icoextract

Usage

icoextract ships icoextract and icolist scripts to extract and list icon resources in an executable:

usage: icoextract [-h] [-V] [-n NUM] [-v] input output

Windows PE EXE icon extractor.

positional arguments:
  input              input filename
  output             output filename

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -V, --version      show program's version number and exit
  -n NUM, --num NUM  index of icon to extract
  -v, --verbose      enables debug logging

usage: icolist [-h] [-V] [-v] input

Lists group icons present in a program.

positional arguments:
  input          input filename

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -V, --version  show program's version number and exit
  -v, --verbose  enables debug logging