start partial binary

[David Wilson]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 11:59 PM, Moritz Warning
<moritzwarning at _nospam_web.de> wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:33:29 -0400, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>
>  > On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 11:21:27PM +0000, Moritz Warning wrote:
>
> >> Is that possible with D?
>  >
>
> > I'm pretty sure this is an operating system thing. I don't think it can
>  > be done on Linux, but on Windows, you might be able to do it with
>  > resources embedded in the executable, just like you would with C
>  > programs.
>
>  Would be a neat feature if it would be possible (on Linux).
>  The problem is to load only a part of the binary without the data payload.
>  Loading data from the binary into RAM would be less of a problem.
>

One way is to simply concatenate the data onto the end of the binary,
and write a function to open a standard stream on the file and seek to
the start of the data. For example:

my.exe:
  - <PE data>
  - <ZIP file>
  - <uint32 offset to first byte of zip file>

All a function needs to do is open and read the last 4 bytes, seek to
that position, and test for a zip signature. I'm pretty sure this
works for both PE and ELF, it's the way the Winzip self extractor
works, and some equivalent tools on Linux (I think info-zip provides
something similar).