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1.TH GZEXE 1
2.SH NAME
3gzexe \- compress executable files in place
4.SH SYNOPSIS
5.B gzexe
6[ name ... ]
7.SH DESCRIPTION
8The
9.I gzexe
10utility allows you to compress executables in place and have them
11automatically uncompress and execute when you run them (at a penalty
12in performance). For example if you execute ``gzexe /bin/cat'' it
13will create the following two files:
14.nf
15.br
16 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root bin 9644 Feb 11 11:16 /bin/cat
17 -r-xr-xr-x 1 bin bin 24576 Nov 23 13:21 /bin/cat~
18.fi
19/bin/cat~ is the original file and /bin/cat is the self-uncompressing
20executable file. You can remove /bin/cat~ once you are sure that
21/bin/cat works properly.
22.PP
23This utility is most useful on systems with very small disks.
24.SH OPTIONS
25.TP
26.B \-d
27Decompress the given executables instead of compressing them.
28.SH "SEE ALSO"
29gzip(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1)
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30.SH CAVEATS
31The compressed executable is a shell script. This may create some
32security holes. In particular, the compressed executable relies
33on the PATH environment variable to find
34.I gzip
35and some other utilities
36.I (tail, chmod, ln, sleep).
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37.SH "BUGS"
38.I gzexe
39attempts to retain the original file attributes on the compressed executable,
40but you may have to fix them manually in some cases, using
41.I chmod
42or
43.I chown.