self-extractor?

[Rich Braun]

> Also, Bruce Perens, of the Debian project, wrote some library code for
> tar extraction that could be linked into an executable.  It's used used
> in the dpkg program.

The only self-extracting thing I've seen is the shell archive utility.
You feed a file to the shell as a script, and it unpacks its contents
as files into appropriate subdirectories (and can also invoke a
configuration program).  Not as space efficient as gzipped tar, but
certainly convenient.

There's a program on some archive site somewhere which kits up a
directory of files into a shell archive, but I can't remember the
exact name of this utility (sharc?).

-rich