From: Ted Menks 
Subject: compressing EXEs
Date: 1998/04/16
Message-ID: #1/1
Distribution: fido
References: 
Organization: It's the 4Dos way!    (Teddy's Land   +49-5971-14966
Newsgroups: fido.4dos


Hi Jorj,

(Tuesday April 14 1998 13:26) Jorj Strumolo to Ted Menks about: compressing
EXEs

 TM>> UCEXE isn't just a hacker's tool, anyway.  It's part of the
 >> UC2 package, and often compresses much better than PKlite.
 JS>  It's often a tossup what compresses better.

That's very true, but I've found that lots of exe's originally pklited, became
much smaller if I unpacked them and ran UCEXE on them. Some others took profit
from LZEXE, and only VERY few benefit from DIET.

 JS>   I try a range of them:

 JS> :XC
 JS>  set e=%@ext[%2]^copy %2 d.%e^unp d.%e
 JS>  for %x in (a i g l p u x m t) copy d.%e %x.%e^cr^ainexe a.%e
 JS>  diet -x d.%e^lglz -a g.%e^pklite -a p.%e^ucexe u.%e^lzx l.%e
 JS>  elite i.%e^ks Y^megalite -a m.%e^xpack -o -4 x.% ^
 JS>  tinyprog t.%e^del/q a.old;l.[co]*;u.~*;t.bxe^us e^quit

Disgusting! :-))))) Most of these packers are unknown to me, such as "ainexe",
"lglz", "elite", "megalite" and "xpack". I'm sure I've got tinyprog somewhere,
though... Well, it ain't that important: I could end up using lots of diskspace
to hold all those compressors, without saving enough space from compressing
other executables ;-))))

 JS>  So I do something like "xc srq.exe" and it produces nine
 JS>  copies of the original file, and nine compressed outputs from
 JS>  them.  I try the smallest.  If it works, fine.  If not, I try
 JS>  them in increasing size, keep the smallest that worked, and
 JS>  delete all the rest.

That's what I figured from perusing the above ;-) Looks like a sound system,
even though it wasn't designed to make any noise ;-))

Live long and prosper,
  Ted Menks   Fido  : 2:2449/236.51 / 2:284/412.51
  PGPkeyID: 2048/1B2ACCED  1997/10/03 (available by RRQ)
... If at first you don't succeed, have somebody else do it for you!