Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!unido!sbsvax!frankb
From: frankb@sbsvax.cs.uni-sb.de (Frank Bauernoeppel)
Newsgroups: comp.compression
Subject: Re: Self Extracting Files
Summary: save and portable ?
Message-ID: <11543@sbsvax.cs.uni-sb.de>
Date: 21 Jun 91 07:26:28 GMT
References: <1991Jun17.205910.17669@apex.com> <3745@charon.cwi.nl>
Organization: Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany
Lines: 20

In article <3745@charon.cwi.nl>, sander@cwi.nl (Sander Plomp) writes:
> I, too, hate the selfextracting archives, for exactly the same reasons.
> Yes, they are:
>  (1) The ideal virus carrier.
>  (2) Exceptionally non portable. Nearly always MS-DOS and nothing but
>      MS-DOS.

There is no problem. I can "unzip" self-extracting DOS .exe archives
on a SUN, a VAX or even on a PC without executing them. Since unzip
comes in C, only the native C compiler/linker has the chance to infect 
the program. 

Source code is available at simtel20.army.mil (among others). Thanks
to the people at INFO-ZIP!

BTW, unzip is just one example.
                   ~~~~~~~~~~~
	Greetings 	Frank

frankb@cs.uni-sb.de