From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!sun!megatest!fortune!hpda!hplabs!sri-unix!chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re:  Way to do multiple-host copies?
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.753
Posted: Fri Mar  4 17:47:11 1983
Received: Fri Apr  1 05:50:27 1983

From:  Chris Torek <chris.umcp-cs@UDel-Relay>

We have a local hack called ``makescript'' (actually, we have 2 of
them: one is a script, the other a C program) which makes an 'sh'
shell script of any number of source/binary files, to be mailed
to any other site and run there.  For binarys, it ``uuencode''s them
and runs ``uudecode'' via the script; for other files, it uses sed
to extract them.  (We chose not to use ``cat'' because some mailers
do funny things with lines starting with ``.''.)  So the guy receiving
programs gets something like:

: Run this shell script with "sh" not "csh"
sed -e 's/^X//' << 'go.sysin dd *' > file1.c
Xmain ()
X{
X}
go.sysin dd *
uudecode - << 'go.sysin dd *'
file1.o 644		*** or whatever uudecode needs
@23498235ABEU85HIUEQIGE8IUFMFQM85QWRIU
'go.sysin dd *'

Since uudecode and uuencode live in /usr/ucb, I suspect they're
Berkeley's hacks.  Anyway, this lets us send arbitrary chunks of
file system to others via mail.