man > BZEXE(1)

BZEXE(1)                               General Commands Manual                              BZEXE(1)

NAME
       bzexe - compress executable files in place

SYNOPSIS
       bzexe [ name ...  ]

DESCRIPTION
       The bzexe utility allows you to compress executables in place and have them automatically un‐
       compress and execute when you run them (at a penalty in performance).  For example if you ex‐
       ecute ``bzexe /bin/cat'' it will create the following two files:
           -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  bin   9644 Feb 11 11:16 /bin/cat
           -r-xr-xr-x  1 bin   bin  24576 Nov 23 13:21 /bin/cat~
       /bin/cat~  is  the original file and /bin/cat is the self-uncompressing executable file.  You
       can remove /bin/cat~ once you are sure that /bin/cat works properly.

       This utility is most useful on systems with very small disks.

OPTIONS
       -d     Decompress the given executables instead of compressing them.

SEE ALSO
       bzip2(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1)

CAVEATS
       The compressed executable is a shell script. This may create some security holes. In particu‐
       lar, the compressed executable relies on the PATH environment variable to find gzip and  some
       other utilities (tail, chmod, ln, sleep).

BUGS
       bzexe  attempts  to retain the original file attributes on the compressed executable, but you
       may have to fix them manually in some cases, using chmod or chown.

                                                                                            BZEXE(1)