Add a Binary Payload to your Shell Scripts

Feb 20, 2009, 23:31 (1 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Mitch Frazier)

"Adding a binary payload to a shell script could, for instance, be used to create a single file shell script that installs your entire software package which could be composed of hundreds of files. You merely append the tar or gzip file of your package as a binary payload to the script file, when the script runs it extracts the payload and does its task with the extracted files.

"For this example I assume the appended file is a tar.gz file. The payload is appended to the end of an installation script preceded by a marker line (PAYLOAD:). The appended data is either uuencoded or just binary data. The script that follows takes a single argument which should be the tar.gz to append to the installation script. The installation script template install.sh.in is copied to install.sh with the payload appended. This script is named addpayload.sh follows:"

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