GZEXE(1)

🎀 GZEXE(1) · General Commands Manual 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, the name of this one is gzexe, and it's basically the tool that compresses executable files in place 🗜️💖 ngl the name is so on brand.

💅 SYNOPSIS 💅

gzexe name ...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so the gzexe utility lets you squish executables down in place, and then they automatically uncompress and run whenever you open them 🫶 the catch is there's a little performance penalty, but it's giving space-saver energy ✨

for example, if you run gzexe /usr/bin/gdb, it makes two files:

    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 1026675 Jun  7 13:53 /usr/bin/gdb
    -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 2304524 May 30 13:02 /usr/bin/gdb~

so /usr/bin/gdb~ is the original file 📦, and /usr/bin/gdb is the self-uncompressing executable 🧚 once you're 100% sure /usr/bin/gdb works properly, you can delete /usr/bin/gdb~ 🗑️ (no cap, that's the big glow-up moment).

this one is most useful on systems with very small disks 🥺💀

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -d — decompress the given executables instead of compressing them 🔓

🌸 SEE ALSO 🌸

gzip(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1) 💜

⚠️ CAVEATS ⚠️

bestie, listen 🙈 the compressed executable is a shell script, and that may create some security holes 😭

the compressed executable relies on the PATH environment variable to find gzip and some standard utilities: basename, chmod, ln, mkdir, mktemp, rm, sleep, and tail 🍓 so yes, your PATH matters a LOT here 🔥

🐞 BUGS 🐞

the gzexe command tries its best to keep the original file attributes on the compressed executable 🥹 but in some cases you may have to fix them manually using chmod or chown 🛠️ it's not you, it's the vibes 💅

GZEXE(1) till the very end, bestie 🌈✨ manpage energy forever 🫶💖