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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm,net.news.sa,net.sources.d
Subject: Re: Beware of Blindly Un-SHARing a File
Message-ID: <2033@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Apr-86 21:07:02 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2033
Posted: Sat Apr 19 21:07:02 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 21-Apr-86 01:50:08 EST
References: <947@kitty.UUCP> <2407@prls.UUCP> <1439@garfield.columbia.edu> <2555@utcsri.UUCP> <2511@teddy.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
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Xref: watmath net.news.adm:615 net.news.sa:275 net.sources.d:129

In article <2511@teddy.UUCP> jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson) writes:
>A reasonable substitute for shar would be the Berkeley "Portable AR" format,
>which unfortunately has not been adopted by AT&T (at least not by System V,
>maybe V.2?).  It is a simple enough format that a program can be written to
>extract files for those without a "portable" AR  (in fact, I vaguely remember
>someone DID do this several years ago - I'll have to root around in my old
>net.sources tapes).  It does not provide any directory heirarchy capability,
>nor does it allow for automatic uuencode/uudecode of binary files, which
>a good shar replacement should be able to do.

To set the record straight, the portable archive format was invented by
Dennis Ritchie (I think) and adopted by Berkeley.  System V Release 2
also uses this archive format, as does V8.  So it's widely (but not quite
universally) available.

A couple years ago, some members of the UUCP project wrote public domain
programs to encode and decode these programs (par and unpar, they were
called.)  I think they were written by Paul Bame and Bill Welch.  These
programs were distributed back then.  Only problem is my copy of Bill's
unpar program has disappeared from my machine.  If someone has a copy
(are you out there, Bill?  Mail is broken from cbosgd due to broken
phone lines, so I can't just send you mail) we can assemble them and
post them again.

John points out some of the disadvantages of the portable archive format.
The overwhelming advantage at the time is that, for lots of very small
files, unpar is MUCH faster than the shell.  Also, par preserves the owner
and the write date.

	Mark