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A comment on The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki).

Re:The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki) by sn9 on Saturday December 07, 2024 @03:00AM (#42348076)
I think around a decade ago, I tried installing a copy of Mathematica and the installer from Wolfram was a bash program that was over a GB in size.

I tried opening it up just to look at it and most text editors just absolutely choked on it. I can't remember, but it was either Vim xor Emacs that could finally handle opening it.

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Re:The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki) by zertrin on Saturday December 07, 2024 @03:07AM (#42348105)
Most likely it embedded a (g)zip inside the shell script? I've seen this frequently.
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Re:The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki) by szszrk on Saturday December 07, 2024 @03:07AM (#42348107)
Some installers include binaries inside their shell scripts. So the script extracts data from itself. Not great for transparency, but works and is single file.
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Re:The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki) by anthk on Saturday December 07, 2024 @06:44AM (#42349123)
shar, shell archives.
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Re:The Biggest Shell Programs in the World (Wiki) by szszrk on Saturday December 07, 2024 @07:19AM (#42349293)
A bit of a pain in the ass in some corporate environments, where binaries are scanned before use by DLP software ;/
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