Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!sat!farren From: farren@sat.com (Michael J. Farren) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc Subject: Re: "-----" in comp.sources.amiga posting headers deprecated Keywords: the achingly nuzzlable neck of TJ Flynn (tm xanthian lust, inc.) Message-ID: <1991Mar07.214758.1750@sat.com> Date: 7 Mar 91 21:47:58 GMT References: <1991Mar6.003554.10977@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Distribution: na Organization: SAT Lines: 33 kherron@ms.uky.edu writes: >Unshar is not a standard part of unix, and if it's confusing the contents >with the wrapper it's broken. I don't see why the people creating these >files should have to allow for broken software. It's not broken. It's the same situation as if you had an executable file in your local directory named "sed" which just happened to play The Star Spangled Banner on your line printer when invoked. If such were the case, even "sh " wouldn't work properly, now would it? True, unshar is not a standard Unix utility. The "shar" format, however, has been around a long time now, and has evolved a fairly consistent structure and standard. One of the elements of that standard is that the first line which consists of a line of hyphens is always the "cut here" line, below which everything is part of the actual shell script which makes up a shar. >If you're unpacking on unix, you can always pipe the shar file to sh; Hell, you don't even need to do that. Just "sh " works just fine. But before you can do that, you need to edit the file, to eliminate the header information that's tacked on by its passage through the Net. The real utility of "unshar" lies in the fact that you don't need to do that with "unshar" - just "unshar " and it's all taken care of for you. Easy, quick, nice - except when it can't work, because people didn't realize that there were such utilities out there. With a little luck, they'll start avoiding long lines of hyphens at the beginnng of the line, and all of our troubles will be over :-) -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Michael J. Farren farren@sat.com | | He's moody, but he's cute. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+