Have you ever wanted to package your application as a single executable that extracts itself when launched? You have come to the right place.
Traditional packers take an executable, compress its executable segment and make a new executable that will decompress it in memory when launched.
Lizard aims at simplifying the task of decompressing a 7-Zip archive to a temporary location from which an executable will be launched.
This project was originally created with a specific use case in mind: creating an executable that contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of a Windows executable. When launched, the packer detects if it is running inside a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows environment, and proceeds to extract and launch the optimal version of the program. Since both executables are just different versions of the same program, their resource segments are identical. Because they are compressed inside the same 7-Zip archive rather than individually, the resource segment is correctly compressed only once, resulting in efficient compression.
Lizard does not provide specific tooling to generate packed executables. It is a library that contains a 7-Zip decompressor (LZMA SDK), along with portability functions to deal with environment detection, files, paths, Unicode encoding, etc. Embedding the 7-Zip archive inside the packer program can be done using platform-specific resource compilers. Otherwise, the YARC resource compiler can be used to achieve this task.
lizard [options]
Options:
-eextract files from archive-llist files from archive-iinput file-ooutput path-hprint help-vprint version (1.0.0)-Vverbose mode