Introducing INF Files

In order to become immediately productive with Infedit, it helps to have a model of the parts of an INF file in mind. Infedit builds an INF file one section and one item at a time.

An INF file is made up of a set of named sections. To be used by the operating system installer, a section must contain one or more items.

Each section begins with the section name enclosed in square brackets. In this way, INF files are similar to Windows INI files. There can be any number of sections in an INF file, but there are only about two dozen types of sections that can be in an INF file, and about eight of these types of sections appear far more often than other types in INF files.

Each type of section has a particular purpose; for example, to copy files or to add entries to the registry. Each of the items in a section contributes to that section's purpose and the syntax of each type of item that can be used in a particular type of section reflects that.

Three sections from a sample INF file are shown below, so you can more easily visualize an INF file being made up of sections and each section being made up of one or more items. The section named SourceDisksNames contains one item, the section named SourceDisksFiles contains two items, and the section named Strings contains three items.


[SourceDisksNames]
1=CX2590 Windows 95 Installation Disk,Instd1,0000-0000

[SourceDisksFiles]
CX2590.MPD=1
SRSutil.exe=1

[Strings]
String1="Corporation X"
String2="Corporation X"
String3="CX2590 SCSI Adapter"