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by dheera 660 days ago
There are also multiple reasons for a program to read its own executable.

- Decompressing and inflating a compressed binary block with a generic decompressor at the top (e.g. a bash or python script with a binary blob at the end)

- Checksumming its own executable (skipping the checksum string) to resist virus infection. Not bulletproof but viruses aren't usually smart enough to circumvent this