GZEXE(1) MachTen Programmer’s Manual GZEXE(1)

NAME
gzexe - compress executable files in place

SYNOPSIS
gzexe [ name ... ]

DESCRIPTION
The gzexe 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 ‘‘gzexe /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 com-
pressing them.

SEE ALSO
gzip(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1)

CAVEATS
The compressed executable is a shell script. This may cre-
ate 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).

BUGS
gzexe attempts to retain the original file attributes on
the compressed executable, but you may have to fix them
manually in some cases, using chmod or chown.

MachTen 1