Hi Bill. This sounds like the custom master I did some decades ago which used Filesystem.Tar in master_read_file() and master_file_stat(). One nice thing with tar files is that they start with the filename of the first file, which can be anything, so you can actually put a hashbang there and make the whole thing executable.
Come to think of it, zip files have all their metadata at the end, so I guess you could do the same with zips if you add a little effort? It would be sweet to have a "pike -x zipackage" which automatically created a stand-alone archive with a working hashbang! (For W*ndows you'd probably have to pick a filename which ends with .somemagicletters for the archive to be exectutable as an application...)
