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How to extract the files from within the Linux Adobe Reader (Acrobat) Installer
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extract-acrobat-files.md

When making native Linux packages for Adobe Reader (Acrobat) it is better to use the installer as a source, since it is approximately 13.5 Mb smaller due to use of LZMA compression (the same type of high compression used in 7z and xz files).

The .bin actually has a .tar.lzma archive inside it with the exact same files as the .tar.bz2 that is more commonly used as a source package. The contents of this compressed tar can be extracted using tail, XZ-Utils and tar.

Find the location of the LZMA compressed tar:

$ LANG=C grep -abom1 ]$'\000\000'....$'\377\377\377\377\377\377' AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.bin
6888:]�������

Add 1 to this value (e.g. 6889).

The value 6889, has not changed in all releases of Acrobat Reader since .bin files where first offered (i.e. AdbeRdr9.1.0-1_i486linux_enu.bin from February 2009), so it should be relatively safe just to hardcode.

The contents of the internal, compressed tar can be extracted like so:

$ tail -c+6889 AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.bin | xz -qqd | tar x

You will find everything in the newly created directory called AdobeReader.

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