How would I go about making a self extracting archive that can be executed on sh?
The closest I have come to is:
extract_archive () {
printf '<archive_contents>' | tar -C "$extract_dir" -xvf -
}
Where <archive_contents> contains a tarball with null characters, %, ' and \ characters escaped and enclosed between single quotes.
Is there any better way to do this so that no escaping is required?
(Please don't point me to shar, makeself etc. I want to write it from scratch.)
Alternative variant is to use marker for end of shell script and use sed to cut-out shell script itself.
Script selfextract.sh:
#!/bin/bash
sed '0,/^#EOF#$/d' $0 | tar zx; exit 0
#EOF#
How to use:
# create sfx
cat selfextract.sh data.tar.gz >example_sfx.sh
# unpack sfx
bash example_sfx.sh