Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!axion!tsa!domo From: domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: wishlist: current line number variable Message-ID: <1990Jul28.151041.23484@tsa.co.uk> Date: 28 Jul 90 15:10:41 GMT References: <8815@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <8854@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <15698@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <8873@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> Reply-To: domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) Organization: The Standard Answer Ltd. Lines: 21 In article <8873@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes (apropos of using perl to implement self-unpacking archives despite there being far fewer copies of perl in the world than of sh): >True 'nuff. But all the unshars break whenever someone needs to do something >new in their shar. There's not really a shar standard yet, and as soon >as there is one, someone will find a valid reason to break it. Boring standards note: the IEEE P1003.2a Shell and Tools User Portability Extension folks got close to putting shar into the standard, but yanked it from the draft earlier this year on the grounds of insufficient existing practise, insufficient consensus between implementations, insufficient interest, and so on. While this may may cause the jaws of readers in netland to drop, there is some truth in this rationale: shar (IMHO) is widely used in the Usenet community, but little used elsewhere -- and ``elsewhere'' constitutes most of the market for POSIX-conforming systems. So, for better or worse, nobody need worry about standards for shar for a while yet... -- Dominic Dunlop