I just went to the vmware website because I want to try workstation over virtualbox. I signed up for a workstation trial and clicked download on the 64bit linux version. What downloaded is a 320 megabyte txt file VMware-Workstation-Full-8.0.2-591240.x86_64.txt

What gives? Is anyone familiar with this pattern of delivering software? How do I run it?

Here is the beginning of that file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# VMware Installer Launcher
#
# This is the executable stub to check if the VMware Installer Service
# is installed and if so, launch it.  If it is not installed, the
# attached payload is extracted, the VMIS is installed, and the VMIS
# is launched to install the bundle as normal.

# Architecture this bundle was built for (x86 or x64)
ARCH=x64

if [ -z "$BASH" ]; then
   # $- expands to the current options so things like -x get passed through
   if [ ! -z "$-" ]; then
      opts="-$-"
   fi

   # dash flips out of $opts is quoted, so don't.
   exec /usr/bin/env bash $opts "$0" "$@"
   echo "Unable to restart with bash shell"
   exit 1
fi

set -e

ETCDIR=/etc/vmware-installer
OLDETCDIR="/etc/vmware"

### Offsets ###
# These are offsets that are later used relative to EOF.
FOOTER_SIZE=52

# This won't work with non-GNU stat.
FILE_SIZE=`stat --format "%s" "$0"`
offset=$(($FILE_SIZE - 4))

MAGIC_OFFSET=$offset
offset=$(($offset - 4))

CHECKSUM_OFFSET=$offset
offset=$(($offset - 4))

VERSION_OFFSET=$offset
offset=$(($offset - 4))

PREPAYLOAD_OFFSET=$offset