Compress programs

Question

Write a program/script that decompresses and passes any compressed data appended at the end of the binary/file as standard input to a program specified as arguments.

$ gzip --to-stdout input >> your_solution
$ your_solution program args...

should have the same effects as:

$ program args... < input

Answer 1

zsh: (20 chars)

Edit: because zsh doesn't re-parse arguments like bash, I can lose the "s and it will still work with spaces in args

#!/usr/bin/zsh
tail -n+3 $0|zcat|$@

Bash (25 24 chars not including shebang line)

#!/bin/bash
tail -n+3 "$0"|zcat|"$@"

Answer 2

C (251 chars)

Way too long to win, but I wanted to do one in a compiled language to make things interesting. (It turned out to be quite straightforward actually).

It's probably very compiler-dependent (I used GCC 4.4.3 with the default settings on 32-bit Linux)

#include<stdio.h>
#define q(x)FILE*x=x##open(
#define w strcpy(o+b
o,s=7462;char b[99];main(int i,char**a){q(f)*a,"r");while(--s)fgetc(f);
for(o=0;++s<i;o++[b]=32)w,a[s]),o+=strlen(a[s]);w,"|zcat");q(p)b,"w");
for(;~(i=fgetc(f));fputc(i,p));fclose(p);}

Answer 3

Bash (OP solution)

This is an example I came up with:

cat $0 | awk 'NR > 1' | zcat | $* ; exit