How do installers work?

How do installers work? I know that they copy files from inside the program and past them automaticy in a area where you want them to go. My main question is where do the installers keep these files at? Becuase some downloads just give you the INSTALL.exe and that is it. How do they do this?

Thank you.

Installers take a series of files, pack them together, usually with some sort of compression, keep some additional information like registry entries to modify and other actions to take, and then whatever is necessary to show the installer interface. All of that gets bundled together as an exe.

If you want to examine an installer to get a better feel, play around with NSIS [NSIS Homepage].

How does this get blended together? Is it like having your own compresion system like winzip or something like that, but exept it asks you automaticly where you want them? Is that what you are saying? Becuase I am making my own just for fun and see what it is like to make something like that for my own use for stuff like mods that I am releasing for games. I am using C++. I know too advance for a C++ noob. I am just going left to right here and there and see what happens.

It's quite similar, just extended quite a bit more. With winzip, you take a zip file and use winzip to unzip it. These installers are like winzip and the zip file combined. In fact, you can create auto-extracting zip files (an exe) with WinZip and some other compression programs. Just that with a installer, it can be more complex because you can additionally delete files, modify files, modify registry, etc. for the installation.

mmm... Intresting Is there a place I can learn more about this? On how to make a automatic extracting files or atleast what I am trying to do so I can get a better preseption on what I need to do and how to do it?

I don't know off the top of my head any specific places to look for tutorials. I would, like you, go after Google. But do look at NSIS (link posted above). NSIS is written in C and C++ and is open source, so you can learn quite a bit by seeing how their code works.