From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Oct 22 23:55:39 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 380CB37B401 for ; Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:55:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mta7.pltn13.pbi.net (mta7.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.98.8]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E28F643E3B for ; Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:55:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dwalton@acm.org) Received: from thinkpad770z.davidcamp.net ([216.103.90.137]) by mta7.pltn13.pbi.net (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.1 (built May 7 2001)) with SMTP id <0H4F00M2W9WP1C@mta7.pltn13.pbi.net> for questions@freebsd.org; Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:55:37 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 23:55:36 -0700 From: Dave Walton Subject: Self extracting archives (was: Re: vmware) To: questions@freebsd.org Cc: Nathan Kinkade , "Brian T. Schellenberger" , Doug Poland Reply-To: dwalton@acm.org Message-id: <20021022235536.0e9968de.dwalton@acm.org> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.1 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-portbld-freebsd4.6.2) Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 10 Oct 2002, Nathan wrote: > I've had people tell me that unzip may work sometimes, but under what > conditions I'm not sure. > > I saw the pkzip port, but I couldn't find info anywhere telling me that > it would extract .exe formated self-extracting archives. Have you used > either of these tools recently to extract these types of pernicious > archives? Nathan, Since a .exe self-extracting archive is just an archive with a simple extraction program prepended to it, it is possible to make one out of ANY type of archive. You could even make a self-extracting .tar.gz if you really wanted to. So the answer to when unzip will and won't work is this: Unzip will only work if the archive attached to the extractor is a .zip file. Obviously, this means the key to opening any self-extracting archive is figuring out which type of archive it is. I've found that most archives in the Windoze world (expecially installers) are usually either .zip or .cab archives. So if unzip won't do it for you, I'd suggest having a go with cabextract (/usr/ports/archivers/cabextract) and seeing where that gets you. Dave -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dave Walton dwalton@acm.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message