Pyinstaller questions

hi

i’ve got this code and i wanted to make it a standalone executable, problem is
Pyinstaller creates a huge file (5.5MB) for this little code… so then i tried
to exclude few things in case it gets smaller but it keeps staying at 5.5MB.

also i’ve noticed that some antivirus detect my file as trojan, i guess it should be
a false alarm though i’m uncertain because i can read elsewere that some complilers
in C for example do contain virus payload.

this is my code:

import sys

def main():
  # Check that a filename and search string were provided as command-line arguments
  if len(sys.argv) < 3:
    print("Usage: search <filename> <string>")
    return 1

  # Open the file for reading
  try:
    with open(sys.argv[1], 'r') as fp:
      # Search the file for the specified string
      search_string = sys.argv[2]
      for line in fp:
        if search_string in line:
          return
  except:
    print(f"Error: Could not open file {sys.argv[1]}")
    return 1

  # Make a beep sound if the string was not found
  print("\a")
  return 0

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

and this is the way i tried to make it smaller:

pyinstaller --onefile python_search.py --exclude-module Pyinstaller --exclude-module _pyinstaller_hooks_constrib --exclude-module altgraph --exclude-module easy_install --exclude-module future --exclude-module importlib_metadata --exclude-module libfutursize --exclude-module libpasteurize --exclude-module ordlookup --exclude-module past --exclude-module pefile --exclude-module peutils --exclude-module pip --exclude-module pkg_resources --exclude-module setuptools --exclude-module typing_extensions --exclude-module win32ctypes --exclude-module zipp --exclude matplotlib --exclude scipy --exclude pandas
1 Like

Do you need to care about a 5MiB size? I don’t worry until this get to 100MiB size range.

You will find that the size is made up of the python .dll code, the python stdlib code needed and finally your code. As you package more complex code you may need more binary .dll added to your app, that will increase the size.

You can provide you program to the anti virus vendor so that they can fix their detection logic.
I have done that in the past for code that Microsoft defender false reported, and they fixed defender in a few days.