bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (02/02/89)
<45900199@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu : [ ... ] >.obj or .exe sizes, some compiler vendor is going to compress their >.objs and/or .exe's and expand them at run time: The actual code >segment in the .exe would consist of the decoder, which would decode >the real code and data segments. [ ... ] >On even further consideration, doesn't one of zoo's friends do this? For MS-DOS only, the program 'looz' will extract executables (.COM/.EXE) directly to memory and run them. The executable has to be "small enough". (Maybe one 64K segment?) Nice for largish but seldom-used programs; I 'zoo' it with documentation, and write a .BAT file that executes the thing or optionally extracts the doc. to the console and pipes it into 'list'. The .BAT file takes one cluster (2K for me), but I save 10K or more in compression, possibly much more from the doc. files -- and I can build a consistent "help me please" syntax for info about those rarely-used programs. I also keep some TSRs in .ZOO archives to extract/run them directly when I reboot. 'looz' passes any needed command-line parameters along. 'History', for example, and 'pdtimprk'. (Hmm, haven't tried it with Sidekick... and I'm looking to trim clusters, as usual...)