Hey there,
I hear UPX is a useful tool. I have various EXEs on my usb drive, and i was wondering what can be UPXed.
Will doing this an installer file make much difference? It does DLL's too?
What are the best switches to use? (--best?)
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UPXing installers?
December 9, 2007 - 7:12am
#1
UPXing installers?
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Install packages are already compressed with several archivers, so you can UPX them, but this is mostly pointless - similar to zipping JPG files for example :).
UPX is capable to compress DLL files as well.
You can use the "--best" switch, but it's really slow, and not really worth it (additional 1..2% more compressing depending on the executable file of course).
--ultra-brute is the best, but like the above post it is not normally worth it.
Please search before posting. ~Thanks
besides, anyway i havent had a good time when UPXing NSIS files.
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake,
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
already asked this before (search) and tried... it's useless and slow down the process to open an app when you double click on it...
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
Do not UPX any installers or launchers. They are already quite compressed and if the checksum they keep for embedded data fails (which will happen if you UPX the file), it will refuse to run without the /NCRC switch. UPX will also break difference-file autoupdate for Firefox and Thunderbird (to autoupdate, you would have to download the entire package for the new version instead of the smaller file).
I am working on a project that allows one to use UPX with TBP and FxP without keeping backups and still be able to use the smaller update archive.
https://portableapps.com/node/9807
http://sourceforge.net/projects/upxau
It is still in beta, so if you're not comfortable with non-final releases, you'll have to wait until I make a final release for 1.0. However, I would greatly appreciate it if you would test the beta. I am going to release beta 3 soon, and it has a lot more features and cool things than previous releases, so I recommend you wait until then to use it. I will make an announcement in the thread (you can also watch the SF project page).
As for switches, I use --best --all-methods. It seems to be a pretty good balance between speed and power (it is more on the power side, but usually worth the wait). Except for LZMA (which must be invoked with --lzma), decompression speed is always very fast, so don't hesitate to use --best or -9 because you think it might slow down decompression.
Vintage!