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I think around a decade ago, I tried installing a copy of Mathematica and the installer from Wolfram was a bash program that was over a GB in size.

I tried opening it up just to look at it and most text editors just absolutely choked on it. I can't remember, but it was either Vim xor Emacs that could finally handle opening it.



Most likely it embedded a (g)zip inside the shell script? I've seen this frequently.


Some installers include binaries inside their shell scripts. So the script extracts data from itself. Not great for transparency, but works and is single file.


shar, shell archives.


A bit of a pain in the ass in some corporate environments, where binaries are scanned before use by DLP software ;/




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