- A shell script at head of the file doing the extraction
- followed by the archive to extract, usually a gzip compressed tar file. Makeself also supports uncompressed and bzip2 compressed tar archives.

EE: How is this different from the standard unix command shar ?It is different because the standard unix command shar only wraps text files. makeself appears to wrap any file - tar, gzipped, etc.EE: I"m sorry, but that doesn't appear to be true. My shar tells me that it can handle text and binary files, can uuencode files that look like binary, and can, if desired, compress and uuencode ALL files when storing them...EE: Hmm. Actually, shar does not appear to be able to specify "run this program after extracting it", so I guess there is a difference.EE: shar in modern versions of Linpix can be used to run executables after extraction along with chmodding
RFox - 2013-07-03 13:10:13A fairly simple post processing of shar archives lets you do an extract/execute....though I've only tried this with archives created by Linux shar.
Many of the people interested in makeself will also want to consider alternative methods of "deployment".