> business model. At least it gives you the opportunity to try before
> buying. I don't know why I consider this business model as one of the
> first steps toward open software.

As I do as well. That was a bit tongue in cheek. Still, pkzip was 
widely distributed before the Internet got really going via
BBSes. Nearly everyone with a modem had a copy. It wasn't until
Windows 95 (at least) before compression/archiving became something
that was "standard" with the OS (at least in DOS).

> Encryption was not the only problem. The original poster wanted the file
> to decompress itself.

Well, pkzip can create self-extracting executables, of course. But
we've had them too for as long as I can remember -- they're callsed
shell archives. Still you need some way to encrypt the file. On the
other hand, if the OP wants to be able to extract (cleartext) files,
why should the archive be encrypted in the first place?

In case people aren't familiar with them, shell archives are really
kind of neat in that they contain a shell script that extracts the
files inside the shell script,via what's called  'here' documents (in
shell, this is a 'file' that's embedded in a script.)

#! /bin/sh
# sample here document extractor
cat >extracted-file <<!EOF
*
this is a test of the emergency broadcast system this is only a test

!EOF

More recently, we see self-extracting archives where all the (binary)
data is embedded in the script -- for example, open office's
installer. 





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