makeself - Make self-extractible archives on Unix
makeself.gz.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractible
tar.gz archive from a directory. The resulting file appears as a shell
script, and can be launched as is. The archive will then uncompress itself
to a temporary directory and an optional arbitrary command will be executed
(for example an installation script). This is pretty similar to archives
generated with WinZip Self-Extractor in the Windows world.
The makeself.sh script itself is used only to create the archives from a
directory of files. The resultant archive is actually a gzipped (or bzip2'd
as of 1.2) TAR archive, with a small shell script stub at the beginning
(about 20 lines). This small stub performs all the steps of extracting the
files, running the embedded command, and removing the temporary files when
it's all over. All what the user has to do to install the software contained
in such an archive is to "run" the archive, i.e sh nice-software.sh. I
recommend using the "sh" prefix for such archives not to confuse the users,
since they it's actually shell scripts (with quite a lot of binary data
attached to it though!).
I am trying to keep the code of this script as portable as possible, i.e
it's not relying on any bash-specific features and only calls commands that
are installed on any functioning UNIX-compatible system. This script as well
as the archives it generates should run on any Unix flavor, with any
compatible Bourne shell, provided of course that the compression programs
are available.
Examples of publicly available archives made using makeself are :
* SciTech Display Doctor for Linux beta
* The Myth II patches for the Linux version of the game by Loki
* The final Quake III Arena demo for Linux, published by Loki
* The Makeself distribution itself ;-)
Usage
The syntax of makeself is the following:
makeself.sh [args] archive_dir file_name label startup_script [script_args]
* args are optional options for Makeself. The available ones are :
o --version : Prints the version number on stdout, then exits
immediately
o --bzip2 : Use bzip2 instead of gzip for better compression. The
bzip2 command must be available in the command path. I recommend
that you set the prefix to something like '.bz2.sh' for the
archive, so that potential users know that they'll need bzip2 to
extract it.
o --nocomp : Do not use any compression for the archive, which will
then be an uncompressed TAR.
o --notemp : The generated archive will not extract the files to a
temporary directory, but in a new directory created in the current
directory. This is better to distribute software packages that may
extract and compile by themselves (i.e. launch the compilation
through the embedded script).
o --nox11 : Generate a script that will not try to open a xterm and
run the script within it.
o --lsm file : Provide and LSM file to makeself, that will be
embedded in the generated archive. LSM files are describing a
software package in a way that is easily parseable. The LSM entry
can then be later retrieved using the '-lsm' argument to the
archive. An exemple of a LSM file is provided with Makeself.
* archive_dir is the name of the directory that contains the files to be
archived
* file_name is the name of the archive to be created
* label is an arbitrary text string describing the package. It will be
displayed while extracting the files.
* startup_script is the command to be executed from within the directory
of extracted files. Thus, if you wish to execute a program contain in
this directory, you must prefix your command with "./". For example,
./program will be fine. The script_args are additionnal arguments for
this command.
Here is an example, assuming the user has a package image stored in a
/home/joe/mysoft, and he wants to generate a self-extracting package named
mysoft.sh, which will launch the "setup" script initially stored in
/home/joe/mysoft :
makeself.sh /home/joe/mysoft mysoft.sh "Joe's Nice Software Package" ./setup
Here is also how I created the makeself.gz.sh archive which contains the
Makeself distribution :
makeself.sh --notemp makeself makeself.gz.sh "Makeself version 1.5.1" echo
"Makeself has extracted itself"
Archives generated with Makeself can be passed the -keep command line
argument, which will prevent the files to be extracted in a temporary
directory that will be removed after the embedded script's execution. The
files will then be extracted in the current working directory and will stay
here until you remove them ;-). Starting from version 1.3, the archives
accept two more options: -verbose will prompt the user before executing the
embedded command, and -target dir allows to extract the archive in an
arbitrary place.
License
Makeself is covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 and
above. Archives generated by Makeself don't have to be placed under this
license (although I encourage it ;-)), since the archive itself is merely
data for Makeself.
Download
Get the distribution here (version 1.5.2).
Version history
* v1.0: Initial public release
* v1.1: The archive can be passed parameters that will be passed on to
the embedded script, thanks to John C. Quillan
* v1.2: Cosmetic updates, support for bzip2 compression and non-temporary
archives. Many ideas thanks to Francois Petitjean.
* v1.3: More patches from Bjarni R. Einarsson and Francois Petitjean:
Support for no compression (--nocomp), script is no longer mandatory,
automatic launch in an xterm, optional verbose output, and -target
archive option to indicate where to extract the files.
* v1.4: Many patches from Francois Petitjean: improved UNIX
compatibility, automatic integrity checking, support of LSM files to
get info on the package at run time..
* v1.5: Major bugfixes (1.4 was not working at all!). Optionally disable
the automatic spawning of xterms with the --nox11 option.
* v1.5.1: More bugfixes, added the archive options -check and -list
(Francois Petitjean).
* v1.5.2: Cosmetic changes for more verbose output to better handle big
archives (Quake III demo).
Links
* Check out the "Loki setup" installer, used to install Loki games, and
which I am the co-author.
* Bjarni R. Einarsson also wrote the setup.sh installer script, inspired
by Makeself. Check it out !
Contact
This script was written by Stéphane Peter (megastep@lokigames.com). I
welcome any enhancements and suggestions.
Contributions were included from John C. Quillan, Bjarni R. Einarsson and
Francois Petitjean, thanks to them!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stéphane Peter
Last modified: Wed Dec 8 18:24:12 PST 1999
