ARK is a program archiver and executer stub for MS-DOS. It allows you to create executable files which contain one or more smaller programs, and to execute the programs directly from the archive, without the need to extract them to disk. ARK is useful for combining large numbers of small utility programs into a single file, to save disk space and make collections of small programs easier to manage. The resulting file can then be compressed by an executable file compressor like PKLITE, LZEXE, DIET etc, to save even more space.
ARK stores COM-type programs. It cannot store EXE programs directly. For MS-DOS-only EXE programs that are smaller than about 64K, you may be able to use the accompanying EXC program to convert the EXE file to a COM file so it can be incorporated into an ARK archive.
ARK cannot store Windows or OS/2 executables.
ARK is similar to a utility called XEQ, which was written by Colin J. Stearman (71036.256@compuserve.com) in 1987 and maintained until 1993, but there are several differences. In general, the ARK stub is smaller and much simpler than XEQ's stub, and because ARK is an EXE file, the ARK archive total size is not limited to 64K as it is with
XEQ.