makeself

makeself is a pretty neat shell script which creates a self-extracting archive in the form of a script. It can be found here: http://www.megastep.org/makeself

to simplify the directions, the arguments give to it are

1. the directory which contains the files to be archived
2. the filename which will contain the archive
3. a label
4. script which does something to the archive once extracted

this is useful when building installers.