I am writing an Electron app that, among many other things, restores an unknown .bak file to a MS SQL server and then extracts more information. In order to do this successfully, I need to extract some info from that .bak file programmatically (so SSMS cannot be used). I will be using sqlcmd, since that can be run by Electron's node.js backend. Unfortunately, I have a bit of a chicken and egg problem, because it seems I cannot restore a .bak file without knowing things about the paths for the .mdf files specified within the .bak file (that cannot be found without first restoring it). There is a RESTORE WITH MOVE option, though this seems to also require knowledge of the paths inside the .bak, which cannot be determined from the .bak itself. How might I get this information, or is it impossible?
Read about RESTORE FILELISTONLY.
At this link you'll find further statements one can use together with RESTORE in order to fetch meta data.
The returned resultset of FILELISTONLY will give you the LogicalName, the file's type (Data or Log), information about the file group and much more.
The other statements provide other meta data. Just check it out...