LBZEXE(1)

📦 version 1.0, in fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 LBZEXE(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the lbzexe page, straight outta the General Commands Manual 📖✨ yes it's a real section of the manual, yes we're gonna read it together, hold my hand 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

lbzexe — compress executable files in place 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

lbzexe name ...

like, just hand it some names, plural, as many as you want 👑

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the tea ☕ — the lbzexe utility lets you compress executables in place and then have them automatically uncompress and execute when you run them. yes, truly, they just wake up and go 🏃♀️✨ the catch? there's a penalty in performance — it's giving "gotta pay the toll to cross this bridge" 😭

for example, if you execute lbzexe /usr/bin/gdb it will create the following 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 file 🔥 you can yeet /usr/bin/gdb~ once you are sure that /usr/bin/gdb works properly 🗑️✨ (but like… sure sure, okay? vibe check it first 🙈)

this utility is most useful on systems with very small disks 🥺 tiny disk energy, we've all been there, no judgement 💜

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -d — decompress the given executables instead of compressing them 🔄 it's the uno reverse card of this whole operation, slay

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

the whole friend group fr fr, go say hi 🫶🌈

💀 CAVEATS 💀

okay so listen, this part matters, don't skip it 🙏

the compressed executable is a shell script 📜 this may create some security holes ⚠️ like, actual holes, not the cute kind.

in particular, the compressed executable relies on the PATH environment variable to find lbzip2 and some standard utilities — specifically basename, chmod, ln, mkdir, mktemp, rm, sleep, and tail 🕵️♀️ so if your PATH is messy, things get messy, iykyk

bestie this is a genuine security caveat, not a drill, take it seriously 💅🔒

😭 BUGS 😭

lbzexe attempts to retain the original file attributes on the compressed executable 🎯 but you may have to fix them manually in some cases, using chmod or chown 🔧 like, it tries, it's doing its best, but sometimes you gotta step in and be the main character 👑

that's the whole page, periodt 💅✨ and it's all from the LBZEXE(1) page in the General Commands Manual — thanks for reading with me bestie, go compress something responsibly 🎀🦋💖

📦 where this page comes from