 An early example of a self-extracting archive was the Unix shar archive in which one or more text files were combined into a shell script that when executed recreated the original files.Self-extracting archives can be used to archive any number of data as well as executable files.They must be distinguished from executable compression, where the executable file contains a single executable only and running the file does not result in the uncompressed file being stored on disk, but in its code being executed in memory after decompression.