[Chicago-talk] Archive::SelfExtract

Greg Fast gdf at speakeasy.net
Tue Mar 23 11:39:28 CST 2004


I figured I'd mention this on the list, since I'm curious as
to others' impressions of its (f)utility.

Archive::SelfExtract
(http://search.cpan.org/~gregfast/Archive-SelfExtract-1.0) allows you
to write scripts with attached file archives.  A friend commented that
it's like shar (for anyone out there who remembers shar) except that
you get a perl script instead of shell.

I threw this together as a proof-of-concept after a discussion about
bootstrapping a Java-based installer for an app (the installer can't
run until it's installed the JRE, which it can't do until it runs...).
We've used PerlApp to turn scripts into win32 EXEs before, so I wanted
to see if I could get a single-file perl script which would unpack a
set of files and then run some code.

--
Greg Fast
http://cken.chi.groogroo.com/~gdf/



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