[SDL] [OT] Automaticaly decompressing and running an application (was Dynamically loading SDL dlls)

Andre de Leiradella leiradella at bigfoot.com
Thu Nov 1 17:27:43 PDT 2007


 > Has someone already mentioned the possibility to wrap all resources
 > (executable, libraries, data files) in another executable? There are
 > tools around to generate some char[] arrays from files. This way you
 > could import all resources into another executable which writes these
 > resources to a temporary folder and executes the program.

I did. I have a working prototype already. It will find (using fnkdat) 
some place to decompress all entries of the .tar.bz2 file appended to 
the executable, decompress everything mantaining the directory structure 
of the tar file, call main.exe and enter a loop (with an appropriate 
Sleep call) to wait for main.exe to end. When it does, all files are 
deleted.

Standard streams (stdin, out and err) are passed to main.exe so it 
doesn't open any console window while being able to write to an existing 
console if main.exe was compiled as a console application and uses 
[f]printf. All arguments passed to the utility via the command line are 
also passed to main.exe untouched.

Right now I'm trying to reduce the memory usage of the program. It's 
only ~100 KiB in size, but uses ~3 MiB of RAM while waiting for main.exe 
to end. I'm not convinced that it's that bad though. I'll release the 
utility when I think it's ready for prime time.

Cheers,

Andre


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