Embed a Executable Binary in a shell script

Question

First, I already googled but only found examples where a compressed file (say a .tar.gz) is embedded into a shell script.

Basically if I have a C program (hello.c) that prints a string, say Hello World!.

I compile it to get an executable binary

gcc hello.c -o hello

Now I have a shell script testEmbed.sh

What I am asking is if it is possible to embed the binary (hello) inside the shell script so that when I run

./testEmbed.sh

it executes the binary to print Hello World!.

Clarification: One alternative is that I compress the executable into an archive and then extract it when the script runs. What I am asking is if it is possible to run the program without that.

Up until now, I was trying the method here. But it does not work for me. I guess the author was using some other distribution on another architecture. So, basically this did not work for me. :P

Also, if the workflow for a C program differs from a Java jar, I would like to know that too!

Answer 1

The portable way to do this is with the printf command and octal escapes:

printf '\001\002\003'

to print bytes 1, 2, and 3. Since you probably don't want to write that all by hand, the od -b command can be used to generate an octal dump of the file, then you can use a sed script to strip off the junk and put the right backslashes in place.

Answer 2

I think makeself is what you're describing.