Executable compression

Executable compression takes an executable file, and makes it smaller. This is generally done by compressing the file and bundling it with a small decompression routine, which decompresses the file, in memory, every time it is executed.

It is usually possible to identify a particular kind of compressed executable as such, and decompress it to its original form. Another possibility is to let the program decompress itself, then try to capture it in memory. However, some developers used various tricks to try to make these things difficult.

List of formats

 * AXE (System Enhancement Associates)
 * COMPACK (Prominence Computer Services)
 * DIET (Teddy Matsumoto)
 * ICE (Keith P. Graham)
 * EXEPACK (Microsoft)
 * LEXEM
 * LGLZ (George Lyapko)
 * LZEXE
 * PGMPak (Todor Todorov)
 * PKLITE
 * PROPACKER (Rob Northern Computing)
 * SCRNCH
 * SHRINK
 * TINYPROG (Tranzoa)
 * UPX
 * WWPACK (Piotr Warezak and Rafal Wierzbicki)
 * XPACK (JauMing Tseng)

Software

 * [] - A collection of some compression and decompression utilities for DOS

Links

 * Executable compression