source: trunk/essentials/app-arch/gzip/gzexe.1@ 3918

.TH GZEXE 1
.SH NAME
gzexe \- compress executable files in place
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B gzexe
.I "name .\|.\|."
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.I  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 /usr/bin/gdb'' it
will create the following two files:
.nf
.br
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 1026675 Jun  7 13:53 /usr/bin/gdb
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 2304524 May 30 13:02 /usr/bin/gdb~
.fi
/usr/bin/gdb~ is the original file and /usr/bin/gdb is the self-uncompressing
executable file.  You can remove /usr/bin/gdb~ once you are sure that
/usr/bin/gdb works properly.
.PP
This utility is most useful on systems with very small disks.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-d
Decompress the given executables instead of compressing them.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
gzip(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1)
.SH 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
.I gzip
and some standard utilities
.RI ( basename ,
.IR chmod ,
.IR ln ,
.IR mkdir ,
.IR mktemp ,
.IR rm ,
.IR sleep ,
and
.IR tail ).
.SH "BUGS"
.I gzexe
attempts to retain the original file attributes on the compressed executable,
but you may have to fix them manually in some cases, using
.I chmod
or
.IR chown .