bzexe1

Usage

Overview

The bzexe utility allows you to compress executables in place and have them automatically uncompress and execute when you run them (at a penalty in performance). For example if you execute ``bzexe /bin/cat'' it will create the following two files:

    -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin   9644 Feb 11 11:16 /bin/cat
    -r-xr-xr-x  1 bin   bin  24576 Nov 23 13:21 /bin/cat~

/bin/cat~ is the original file and /bin/cat is the self-uncompressing executable file. You can remove /bin/cat~ once you are sure that /bin/cat works properly.

This utility is most useful on systems with very small disks.

Options

-d

Decompress the given executables instead of compressing them.

Caveats

The compressed executable is a shell script. This may create some security holes. In particular, the compressed executable relies on the PATH environment variable to find gzip and some other utilities (tail, chmod, ln, sleep).