How would I go about making a self extracting archive that can be executed on sh?
The closest I have come to is:
extract_archive () {
printf '<archive_contents>' | tar -C "$extract_dir" -xvf -
}
Where <archive_contents> contains a tarball with null characters, %, ' and \ characters escaped and enclosed between single quotes.
Is there any better way to do this so that no escaping is required?
(Please don't point me to shar, makeself etc. I want to write it from scratch.)
Alternative variant is to use marker for end of shell script and use sed to cut-out shell script itself.
Script selfextract.sh:
#!/bin/bash
sed '0,/^#EOF#$/d' $0 | tar zx; exit 0
#EOF#
How to use:
# create sfx
cat selfextract.sh data.tar.gz >example_sfx.sh
# unpack sfx
bash example_sfx.sh
Since shell scripts are not compiled, but executed statement by statement, you can mix binary and text content using a pattern like this (untested):
#!/bin/sh
sed -e '1,/^exit$/d' "$0" | tar -C "${1-.}" -zxvf -
exit
<binary tar gzipped content here>
You can add those two lines to the top of pretty much any tar+gzip file to make it self extractable.
To test:
$ cat header.sh
#!/bin/sh
sed -e '1,/^exit$/d' "$0" | tar -C "${1-.}" -zxvf -
exit
$ tar -czf header.tgz header.sh
$ cat header.sh header.tgz > header.tgz.sh
$ sh header.tgz.sh
header.sh
END_OF_SCRIPT and the end of the script and sed -e '1,/END_'OF_SCRIPT/ "$0" (note that the sed command must not contain the marker literally - therefore the "misplaced" quote). This eliminates the need to adapt the end address when the number of lines of the script changes.
sed and similar programs are often greedy, but it turns out sed is not greedy in this case, so it can be used.
Some good articles on how to do exactly that could be found at:
Yes, you can do it natively with xtar.
Build xtar elf64 tar self-extractor header (you free to modify it to support elf32, pe and other executable formats), it is based on lightweight bsdtar untar and std elf lib.
cc contrib/xtar.c -o ./xtar
Copy xtar binary to yourTar.xtar
cp ./xtar yourTar.xtar
Append yourTar.tar archive to the end of yourTar.xtar
cat yourTar.tar >> yourTar.xtar
chmod +x yourTar.xtar
