archive regenerating shell script

Question

I need to create a shell program which generates special "archives". These archives will also be shell scripts, so that they can be executed with "sh ".

Let's say I have some directory structure like:

mydir
 +- file.txt
  +- mysubdir
   +- foo.txt

file.txt contains "lorem ipsum" and foo.txt contains "foo bar".

Then executing the archive program:

$ arch.sh mydir > bundle.sh

Should generate a file named "bundle.sh" which may look something like this:

if [ \! -d mydir ] ; then
mkdir mydir
cd mydir
if [ -f file.txt ] ; then
touch file.txt
echo "lorem ipsum" >> file.txt
fi
if [ \! -d mysubdir ] ; then
mkdir mysubdir
cd mysubdir
if [ -f foo.txt ] ; then
  touch foo.txt
  echo "foo bar" >> foo.txt
fi
fi
fi

So, basically, if you would execute this bundle script then you would end up with exactly the same directory structure and file contents that you had when you generated the bundle. Now, only need to write a program which iterates over all the files and directories and creates the appropriate output for each. For text files, you could process them with sed to convert every line in the text file to a shell command. For example, if the file looks like this:

Foo
Bar
Baz
Goo

Then you could generate the following shell commands:

echo "Foo" >> example.txt
echo "Bar" >> example.txt
echo "Baz" >> example.txt
echo "Goo" >> example.txt

For binary files, you should use "uuencode" or maybe you can also use "base64", e.g. when you have a binary file "file.bin" then executing the following commands output a shell script which recreates the binary file:

base64 file.bin | sed 's/.*/echo\ \0 >> file.txt/g'
echo "base64 -d file.txt > file.bin"
echo "rm file.txt"

So in this way, I can just email the bundle.sh commands to a friend, and then when he executes bundle.sh on his machine, he will generate exactly the same directory structure as, say, mydir.

I want to know how to do the recursion to traverse the directory and how to get the name of each file and how to bundle all the shell commands that I generated to bundle.sh. Thanks. guys.

Answer 1

Using makeself :

$ cd /path/to/dir
$ ls 
main.sh dir1 dir2 dir3
$ makeself . ../bundle.run "Creating a bundle with makeself" ./main.sh

main.sh is the main script. The bundle will contains the full recursive dirs and your main script.

To run the bundle :

chmod +x bundle.run
./bundle.run