Shell What is the magic under this?

[Deleted member 66267]

A megabytes in size shell script that could be used like an installer on Windows! I don't know how could they do that! What is the technique they used? Could I apply the same technique to produce similar shell scripts like that on FreeBSD? I liked the idea of an installer like on Windows very much. If it's possible I think I should provide just one giant shell script that is a universal installer, it will depend on the OS it's running to install the correct binary packed with itself. This way I don't have to depend on each OS's own package manager. Of course I will install to /opt and not mess with the software managed by the OS's package managers.

 

[a6h]

That's the page. The actual size is 379 MB.
It means that you didn't even try to test it.

 

[Deleted member 66267]

That's the page. The actual size is 379 MB.
It means that you even didn't try to test it.

No. I really used this big shell script to install NetBeans on Linux. But I think it's wrong to link Linux software here so I only linked the page with download links.

 

[SirDice]

What is the technique they used?

It's just an slightly more advanced version of shar(1). Principle is the same though.

 

[Deleted member 66267]

It's just an slightly more advanced version of shar(1). Principle is the same though.

I should think about this before I come up with the universal installer idea:

It is easy to insert trojan horses into shar files. It is strongly rec-
ommended that all shell archive files be examined before running them
through sh(1). Archives produced using this implementation of shar may
be easily examined with the command:

egrep -av '^[X#]' shar.file

Going with each OS's own package manager is much safer.

 

[SirDice]

Yeah, there's a reason why those "self installing shell scripts" are generally frowned upon Most system administrators avoid them like the plague.

 

[Snurg]

Isn't this becoming fashion again in the Linux world, just called ".run" instead of ".shar"?

Usually there are ways to look into the contents and extract without having to run such self-extracting installers.

 

[Jose]

Eh just pipe curl to a root shell like all the cool kids do. What could possibly go wrong?

Why curl | sudo bash is good: it is simple single line, and uses the same channel that downloading a repository signing key would.

Why curl | sudo bash is good: it is simple single line, and uses the same channel that downloading a repository signing key would. - gist:6700524

gist.github.com

Wow, Rust still wants you to install like this

Getting started

A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

www.rust-lang.org

Even though they got called out for it

Piping curl to s(hell)

0x46.net

 

[Deleted member 66267]

Isn't this becoming fashion again in the Linux world, just called ".run" instead of ".shar"?

I have encountered both ".sh" and ".run".

 

[kpedersen]

My experience is these kinds of shar installers end up in an error message that Zenity or some other scriptable UI wrapper isn't found. And then I would cringe knowing it was going to run that as as root.

Honestly for 3rd party software, just a zip or tarball that I can extract to /opt is always a better solution.

 

[unitrunker]

The normal way of creating an installable package outside of the freebsd pkg servers is to ship a txz file with all the install bits inside and use pkg add -f xyz.txz

 

[Snurg]

pkg add -f xyz.txz

I didn't find a -f option mentioned In the pkg() man page.
Is this an undocumented feature?

 

[VladiBG]

read the man page of the sub command in your case this will be pkg-add(8) you can also find a link to them on the end of tha man page of pkg(8)

 

[mark_j]

It's just an slightly more advanced version of shar(1). Principle is the same though.

Ah shar and the re-assembly of multiple mail messages to get the latest software off uucp, later usenet. Shudder...