How to run unmanaged executable from memory rather than disc

Question

I want to embed a command-line utility in my C# application, so that I can grab its bytes as an array and run the executable without ever saving it to disk as a separate fil

Answer 1

Creating a RAMdisk or dumping the code into memory and then executing it are both possible, but extremely complicated solutions (possibly more so in managed code).

Does it need to be an executable? If you package it as an assembly, you can use Assembly.Load() from a memory stream - a couple of trivial lines of code.

Or if it really has to be an executable, what's actually wrong with writing a temp file? It'll take a few lines of code to dump it to a temp file, execute it, wait for it to exit, and then delete the temp file - it may not even get out of the disk cache before you've deleted it! Sometimes the simple, obvious solution is the best solution.