{"id":802,"date":"2010-10-13T16:30:58","date_gmt":"2010-10-13T16:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/?p=802"},"modified":"2010-10-13T16:30:58","modified_gmt":"2010-10-13T16:30:58","slug":"how-to-make-a-self-extracting-exe-file-with-free-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/how-to-make-a-self-extracting-exe-file-with-free-software\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Make a self-extracting .exe file with free software"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just putting the finishing touches on a new publication due out next week. I&#8217;ve got to the stage of needing to package the download files into a self-extracting .exe file. In the past I&#8217;ve always used WinZip Self-Extractor, and the old faithful (paid for version) has served me well. <\/p>\n<p>I installed it on my Windows 7 machine, but it doesn&#8217;t work properly (they don&#8217;t make &#8217;em like they used to \ud83d\ude09 ). OK, it&#8217;s a 9 year old version, so it&#8217;s hardly surprising. I checked out the WinZip site and a much more up to date version is available, but it&#8217;s about \u00c2\u00a340. Not a huge amount, but before coughing up I decided to check what else might be out there that could do the job. I was vaguely hoping there might be some freeware out there that could do this by now, since .Zip functionality is pretty much incorporated into Windows these days.  \ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>It just so happens, there is.  :laugh: I found a nice little app called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chilkatsoft.com\/chilkatsfx.asp\">ZIP 2 Secure<\/a> which does quite a nice job of it.  :yes: It also offers 256 bit AES encryption  :yes:<br \/>\nAnd the price is the best part of all.  \ud83d\ude00 <\/p>\n<p><strong>Update: 17 October 2010<\/strong><br \/>\nJust a quick update to say that, this software behaves a little bit strangely in Windows 7 pro. Although it packages up the .exe files beautifully, it seems that, on my computer at least, you have to reinstall it each time you run it. Not a major issue, since it&#8217;s very quick. Also I have very occasional need for creating .exe files. If I used it every day this would be annoying. Mind you, if I used it every day, I&#8217;d probably stump up the \u00c2\u00a340 for the WinZip .exe file maker, which offers slightly more functionality. For a free download though, you can&#8217;t really go wrong with Zip 2 Secure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to Make a self-extracting .exe file with free software. Package up and encrypt (optional) your files into self-extracting .exe file with ZIP 2 Secure Exe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,4],"tags":[9,113],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}