NAME

makeself - An utility to generate self-extractable archives.

SYNTAX

makeself [options] archive_dir file_name label [startup_script] [args]

DESCRIPTION

This program is a free (GPL) utility designed to create self-extractable archives from a directory.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported.

-v, --version: Prints out the makeself version number and exits.
-h, --help: Print out help information.
--tar-quietly: Suppress verbose output from the tar command
--quiet: Do not print any messages other than errors
--gzip: Compress using gzip (default if detected).
--bzip2: Compress using bzip2.
--pbzip2: Compress using pbzip2.
--xz: Compress using xz.
--lzo: Compress using lzop.
--lz4: Compress using lz4.
--compress: Compress using the UNIX 'compress' command.
--nocomp: Do not compress the data.
--complevel lvl: Specify the compression level for gzip,bzip2,pbzui2,xz,lzo or lz4
--notemp: The archive will create archive_dir in the current directory and uncompress in ./archive_dir.
--copy: Upon extraction, the archive will first copy itself to a temporary directory.
--append: Append more files to an existing makeself archive. The label and startup scripts will then be ignored.
--current: Files will be extracted to the current directory. Both --current and --target dir imply --notemp.
--target dir: Extract directly to a target directory. Directory path can be either absolute or relative.
--header file: Specify location of the header script.
--cleanup file: Specify a cleanup script that executes on interrupt and when finished successfully.
--follow: Follow the symlinks in the archive.
--noprogress: Do not show the progress during the decompression.
--nox11: Disable automatic spawn of an xterm if running in X11.
--nowait: Do not wait for user input after executing embedded program from an xterm.
--nomd5: Do not create a MD5 checksum for the archive.
--nocrc: Do not create a CRC32 checksum for the archive.
--lsm file: LSM file describing the package. --packaging-date date Use provided string as the packaging date instead of the current date.

EXAMPLES

Here is an example, assuming the user has a package image stored in a /home/joe/mysoft, and he wants to generate a self-extracting package named mysoft.sh, which will launch the "setup" script initially stored in /home/joe/mysoft:

makeself.sh /home/joe/mysoft mysoft.sh "Joe's Nice Software Package" ./setup
Here is also how I created the makeself.run archive which contains the Makeself distribution:
makeself.sh --notemp makeself makeself.run "Makeself by Stephane Peter" echo "Makeself has extracted itself"

AUTHORS

Makeself has been written by Stéphane Peter <megastep@megastep.org>. This man page was originally written by Bartosz Fenski <fenio@o2.pl> for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution (but it may be used by others).