UPX: Packer for Executables
by Kevin Dangoor
Here’s a nifty tool: UPX: the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables. It will compress your executable programs and then decompress them (quickly!) on the fly, thus allowing them to take up less disk space. The authors claim there is no additional memory usage caused by the in-place decompression.
Of course, with machines having 100GB+ hard drives it’s hard to see where the gain is in compressing a 4MB program down to 3MB… but this tool could be useful if you’re distributing software or if you’ve got a program that you want to be able to run from a floppy. (A what?)
Upx is stable, professional quality compression software, well worth the download, latest version (1.24) is about a year old at time of writing, and has been in use on my PC all that time with no problems. Beta releases are available suggesting an update is imminent. Slower to pack than Aspack, usually produces a smaller .EXE and don’t forget you pack once and unpack many times. Excellent freeware
No matter how hard I tried,
I could find no reason for people to create software and then give it out for free.
It costs hell of time to develop something, why not sell it?
There must be some reason.
Brian
UPX – Executable Packer – a what?
EXE packer