Much simpler solution that often might be enough is xxd -i.

Another option for those willing to use GNU C extensions is a small inline assembly fragment with the .incbin directive…wrapped up in a convenient macro approximating the usage in the article (the .len member here is admittedly a bit hackish), perhaps something like:

#include <stdio.h>

#define DATA_FILE(name, file)  \
	extern const char _##name##_data[], _##name##_len[]; \
	asm(".pushsection .rodata\n" \
	    ".local _" #name "_data\n" \
	    "_" #name "_data:\n" \
	    ".incbin \"" file "\"\n" \
	    ".local _" #name "_len\n" \
	    ".set _" #name "_len, . - _" #name "_data\n" \
	    "_" #name "_data_end:\n" \
	    ".byte 0\n" \
	    ".popsection"); \
	static const struct { \
		const char* path; \
		const char* data; \
		size_t len; \
	} name = { \
		.path = file, \
		.data = _##name##_data, \
		.len = (size_t)&_##name##_len, \
	}

DATA_FILE(foo, "foo"); /* replace with __FILE__ for a cheater-quine... */

int main(void)
{
	fwrite(foo.data, 1, foo.len, stdout);
	return 0;
}

(This approach has the disadvantage of introducing an external file dependency that -M flags won’t report, however, so it’ll probably require a manual annotation in your makefile.)

On illumos systems we have elfwrap(1), which will create an object file with a symbol for the start and end of a region containing the bytes from the wrapped file that you can then link into C or C-like programs.

FWIW, I also made a tool like this: pyxxd

More tools like this:

• objres - any file ‘compiled’ into an object file, with corresponding symbol.
• bin2s (a, b) - outputs GAS code