NAME
Compress -- Compress your code.
SYNOPSIS
use Compress::SelfExtracting 'compress';
$result = compress $data, OPTIONS ... ;or
bash$ perl -MCompress::SelfExtracting -e 'zscript ...' \
< script.pl > compressed.pl
bash$ ssh user@host -e perl < compressed.plDESCRIPTION
Compress::SelfExtracting allows you to create pure-Perl self-extracting scripts using a variety of compression algorithms. These scripts will then run on any system with a recent version of Perl.
Functions
zscript-
Reads a script on standard input, and writes the compressed result to standard output.
compress-
Takes a string as its first argument, and returns the compressed result.
Options
zscript and compress support the following options:
- type
-
Which compression algorithm to use.
Compress::SelfExtractingcurrently supports the five types of compression listed below. LZW and LZSS are probably the most useful.- BWT -- Burrows-Wheeler Transform (bzip)
-
Note: BWT currently only uses a single block, and is unusably slow on files larger than about 12 kilobytes. Furthermore, the standalone decompression code is significantly larger than that for other methods.
- LZW -- Lempel-Ziv 78-based algorithm
- LZ77 -- Lempel-Ziv 77
- LZSS -- a variant of LZ77
- Huffman -- Huffman character-frequency coding
- standalone (default: yes)
-
Create a self-extracting script, rather than one using
Compress::SelfExtracting::Filter. - uu (default: no)
-
Create a uucompressed script. The result will be one third larger, but will still be runnable, and will be 8-bit clean. Interestingly, novice programmers may find it hard to distinguish between the decompression code and the UU-encoded data.
EXPORTS
Compress::SelfExtracting exports the zscript function by default, for command-line convenience.
AUTHOR
Sean O'Rourke, <seano@cpan.org>
Bug reports welcome, patches even more welcome.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2002 Sean O'Rourke. All rights reserved, some wrongs reversed. This module is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself. Let me know if you actually find it useful.