From: Dan Ingalls [mailto:Dan.Ingalls at disney.com]
>
> We discussed this briefly over a year ago WRT single-file 
> apps and there was concern at the time that this approach 
> would run afoul of many virus protection schemes.  Anyone 
> know what's possible and what's not here?

It's been a while for me, but certainly EXE files have this potential.
Building a debug version of an EXE will (or at least used to, before the PDB
approach) have debug info attached at the end of the EXE file which is not
loaded by the OS into memory.  There should be attributes in the EXE header
that can be adjusted to allow for the data to be appended.  I suspect this
is doable for UNIX as well (although I am totally unfamiliar with any
executable binary header, certainly dependent on the binary format).  And
though I know next to nothing about Macs, I suspect it would be possible to
place the image in the resource fork or use a similar approach as the
others.

It's not immediately obvious to me why virus protection schemes would have
problems with this or any similar approach.  Not that I'm any kind of
expert, but virus scanners as I understand it look for signatures of
particular viruses which may include byte sequences or certain operations in
proximity to each other, as well as more sophisticated detection heuristics.
I suppose one may run the risk of a false positive, but I don't see why this
would be any different from having, say, a blob of initialized binary data
in a data structure as part of the data segment of a program.

t
--
Tom Burns -- tburns at appnet.net -- http://www.aisys.com
AppNet Midwest -- http://www.appnet.net