The following was generated from http://www.megastep.org/makeself/
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makeself - Make self-extractable archives on Unix
[1]makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a
self-extractable tar.gz archive from a directory. The resulting file
appears as a shell script (many of those have a .run suffix), and can
be launched as is. The archive will then uncompress itself to a
temporary directory and an optional arbitrary command will be executed
(for example an installation script). This is pretty similar to
archives generated with WinZip Self-Extractor in the Windows world.
Makeself archives also include checksums for integrity self-validation
(CRC and/or MD5 checksums).
The makeself.sh script itself is used only to create the archives from
a directory of files. The resultant archive is actually a compressed
(using gzip, bzip2, or compress) TAR archive, with a small shell
script stub at the beginning. This small stub performs all the steps
of extracting the files, running the embedded command, and removing
the temporary files when it's all over. All what the user has to do to
install the software contained in such an archive is to "run" the
archive, i.e sh nice-software.run. I recommend using the "run" (which
was introduced by some Makeself archives released by Loki Software) or
"sh" suffix for such archives not to confuse the users, since they
know it's actually shell scripts (with quite a lot of binary data
attached to it though!).
I am trying to keep the code of this script as portable as possible,
i.e it's not relying on any bash-specific features and only calls
commands that are installed on any functioning UNIX-compatible system.
This script as well as the archives it generates should run on any
Unix flavor, with any compatible Bourne shell, provided of course that
the compression programs are available.
As of version 2.1, Makeself has been rewritten and tested on the
following platforms :
* Linux (all distributions)
* Sun Solaris (8 tested)
* HP-UX (tested on 11.0 and 11i on HPPA RISC)
* SCO OpenUnix and OpenServer
* IBM AIX 5.1L
* MacOS X (Darwin)
* SGI IRIX 6.5
* FreeBSD
* UnicOS / Cray
If you successfully run Makeself and/or archives created with it on
another system, then [2]let me know!
Examples of publicly available archives made using makeself are :
* Game patches and installers for [3]Id Software games like Quake 3
for Linux or Return To Castle Wolfenstien ;
* All game patches released by [4]Loki Software for the Linux
version of popular games ;
* The [5]nVidia drivers for Linux
* The [6]Makeself distribution itself ;-)
* and countless others...
Important note for Apache users: By default, most Web servers will
think that Makeself archives are regular text files and thus they may
show up as text in a Web browser. The correct way to prevent this is
to add a MIME type for this file format, like so (in httpd.conf) :
AddType application/x-makeself .run
Important note for recent GNU/Linux distributions: Archives created
with Makeself prior to v2.1.2 were using an old syntax for the head
and tail Unix commands that is being progressively obsoleted in their
GNU forms. Therefore you may have problems uncompressing some of these
archives. A workaround for this is to set the environment variable
$_POSIX2_VERSION to enable the old syntax, i.e. :
export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209
Usage
The syntax of makeself is the following:
makeself.sh [args] archive_dir file_name label startup_script
[script_args]
* args are optional options for Makeself. The available ones are :
+ --version : Prints the version number on stdout, then exits
immediately
+ --gzip : Use gzip for compression (is the default on
platforms on which gzip is commonly available, like Linux)
+ --bzip2 : Use bzip2 instead of gzip for better compression.
The bzip2 command must be available in the command path. I
recommend that you set the prefix to something like
'.bz2.run' for the archive, so that potential users know that
they'll need bzip2 to extract it.
+ --compress : Use the UNIX "compress" command to compress the
data. This should be the default on all platforms that don't
have gzip available.
+ --nocomp : Do not use any compression for the archive, which
will then be an uncompressed TAR.
+ --notemp : The generated archive will not extract the files
to a temporary directory, but in a new directory created in
the current directory. This is better to distribute software
packages that may extract and compile by themselves (i.e.
launch the compilation through the embedded script).
+ --current : Files will be extracted to the current directory,
instead of in a subdirectory. This option implies --notemp
above.
+ --follow : Follow the symbolic links inside of the archive
directory, i.e. store the files that are being pointed to
instead of the links themselves.
+ --append (new in 2.1.x): Append data to an existing archive,
instead of creating a new one. In this mode, the settings
from the original archive are reused (compression type,
label, embedded script), and thus don't need to be specified
again on the command line.
+ --header : Makeself 2.0 uses a separate file to store the
header stub, called "makeself-header.sh". By default, it is
assumed that it is stored in the same location as
makeself.sh. This option can be used to specify its actual
location if it is stored someplace else.
+ --copy : Upon extraction, the archive will first extract
itself to a temporary directory. The main application of this
is to allow self-contained installers stored in a Makeself
archive on a CD, when the installer program will later need
to unmount the CD and allow a new one to be inserted. This
prevents "Filesystem busy" errors for installers that span
multiple CDs.
+ --nox11 : Disable the automatic spawning of a new terminal in
X11.
+ --nowait : When executed from a new X11 terminal, disable the
user prompt at the end of the script execution.
+ --nomd5 and --nocrc : Disable the creation of a MD5 / CRC
checksum for the archive. This speeds up the extraction
process if integrity checking is not necessary.
+ --lsm file : Provide and LSM file to makeself, that will be
embedded in the generated archive. LSM files are describing a
software package in a way that is easily parseable. The LSM
entry can then be later retrieved using the '-lsm' argument
to the archive. An exemple of a LSM file is provided with
Makeself.
* archive_dir is the name of the directory that contains the files
to be archived
* file_name is the name of the archive to be created
* label is an arbitrary text string describing the package. It will
be displayed while extracting the files.
* startup_script is the command to be executed from within the
directory of extracted files. Thus, if you wish to execute a
program contain in this directory, you must prefix your command
with "./". For example, ./program will be fine. The script_args
are additionnal arguments for this command.
Here is an example, assuming the user has a package image stored in a
/home/joe/mysoft, and he wants to generate a self-extracting package
named mysoft.sh, which will launch the "setup" script initially stored
in /home/joe/mysoft :
makeself.sh /home/joe/mysoft mysoft.sh "Joe's Nice Software Package"
./setup
Here is also how I created the [7]makeself.run archive which contains
the Makeself distribution :
makeself.sh --notemp makeself makeself.run "Makeself by Stephane
Peter" echo "Makeself has extracted itself"
Archives generated with Makeself 2.1 can be passed the following
arguments:
* --keep : Prevent the files to be extracted in a temporary
directory that will be removed after the embedded script's
execution. The files will then be extracted in the current working
directory and will stay here until you remove them.
* --verbose : Will prompt the user before executing the embedded
command
* --target dir : Allows to extract the archive in an arbitrary
place.
* --nox11 : Do not spawn a X11 terminal.
* --confirm : Prompt the user for confirmation before running the
embedded command.
* --info : Print out general information about the archive (does not
extract).
* --lsm : Print out the LSM entry, if it is present.
* --list : List the files in the archive.
* --check : Check the archive for integrity using the embedded
checksums. Does not extract the archive.
* --nochown : By default, a "chown -R" command is run on the target
directory after extraction, so that all files belong to the
current user. This is mostly needed if you are running as root, as
tar will then try to recreate the initial user ownerships. You may
disable this behavior with this flag.
* --tar : Run the tar command on the contents of the archive, using
the following arguments as parameter for the command.
* --noexec : Do not run the embedded script after extraction.
Any subsequent arguments to the archive will be passed as additional
arguments to the embedded command. You should explicitly use the --
special command-line construct before any such options to make sure
that Makeself will not try to interpret them.
License
Makeself is covered by the [8]GNU General Public License (GPL) version
2 and above. Archives generated by Makeself don't have to be placed
under this license (although I encourage it ;-)), since the archive
itself is merely data for Makeself.
Download
Get the latest official distribution [9]here (version 2.1.3).
The latest development version can be grabbed from the Loki Setup CVS
module, at [10]cvs.icculus.org.
Version history
* v1.0: Initial public release
* v1.1: The archive can be passed parameters that will be passed on
to the embedded script, thanks to John C. Quillan
* v1.2: Cosmetic updates, support for bzip2 compression and
non-temporary archives. Many ideas thanks to Francois Petitjean.
* v1.3: More patches from Bjarni R. Einarsson and Francois
Petitjean: Support for no compression (--nocomp), script is no
longer mandatory, automatic launch in an xterm, optional verbose
output, and -target archive option to indicate where to extract
the files.
* v1.4: Many patches from Francois Petitjean: improved UNIX
compatibility, automatic integrity checking, support of LSM files
to get info on the package at run time..
* v1.5.x: A lot of bugfixes, and many other patches, including
automatic verification through the usage of checksums. Version
1.5.5 was the stable release for a long time, even though the Web
page didn't get updated ;-). Makeself was also officially made a
part of the [11]Loki Setup installer, and its source is being
maintained as part of this package.
* v2.0: Complete internal rewrite of Makeself. The command-line
parsing was vastly improved, the overall maintenance of the
package was greatly improved by separating the stub from
makeself.sh. Also Makeself was ported and tested to a variety of
Unix platforms.
* v2.0.1: First public release of the new 2.0 branch. Prior versions
are officially obsoleted. This release introduced the '--copy'
argument that was introduced in response to a need for the
[12]UT2K3 Linux installer.
* v2.1.0: Big change : Makeself can now support multiple embedded
tarballs, each stored separately with their own checksums. An
existing archive can be updated with the --append flag. Checksums
are also better managed, and the --nochown option for archives
appeared.
* v2.1.1: Fixes related to the Unix compression (compress command).
Some Linux distributions made the insane choice to make it
unavailable, even though gzip is capable of uncompressing these
files, plus some more bugfixes in the extraction and checksum
code.
* v2.1.2: Some bug fixes. Use head -n to avoid problems with POSIX
conformance.
* v2.1.3: Bug fixes with the command line when spawning terminals.
Added --tar, --noexec for archives. Added --nomd5 and --nomd5 to
avoid creating checksums in archives. The embedded script is now
run through "eval". The --info output now includes the command
used to create the archive. A man page was contributed by Bartosz
Fenski.
Links
* Check out the [13]"Loki setup" installer, used to install many
Linux games and other applications, and of which I am the
co-author. Since the demise of Loki, I am now the official
maintainer of the project, and it is now being hosted on
[14]icculus.org, as well as a bunch of other ex-Loki projects (and
a lot of other good stuff!).
* Bjarni R. Einarsson also wrote the setup.sh installer script,
inspired by Makeself. [15]Check it out !
Contact
This script was written by [16]St<53>phane Peter (megastep at
megastep.org) I welcome any enhancements and suggestions.
Contributions were included from John C. Quillan, Bjarni R. Einarsson,
Francois Petitjean, and Ryan C. Gordon, thanks to them! If you think I
forgot your name, don't hesitate to contact me.
icculus.org also has a [17]Bugzilla server available that allows bug
reports to be submitted for Loki setup, and since Makeself is a part
of Loki setup, you can submit bug reports from there!
_________________________________________________________________
[18]St<53>phane Peter
Last modified: Sun May 2 00:08:49 PDT 2004
References
1. http://www.megastep.org/makeself/makeself.run
2. mailto:megastep@REMOVEME.megastep.org
3. http://www.idsoftware.com/
4. http://www.lokigames.com/products/myth2/updates.php3
5. http://www.nvidia.com/
6. http://www.megastep.org/makeself/makeself.run
7. http://www.megastep.org/makeself/makeself.run
8. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
9. http://www.megastep.org/makeself/makeself-2.1.3.run
10. http://cvs.icculus.org/
11. http://www.icculus.org/loki_setup/
12. http://www.unrealtournament2003.com/
13. http://www.icculus.org/loki_setup/
14. http://www.icculus.org/
15. http://www.mmedia.is/~bre/programs/setup.sh/
16. mailto:megastep@@megastep.org
17. https://bugzilla.icculus.org/
18. mailto:megastep@@megastep.org
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