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From: jewett@hpl-opus.HP.COM (Bob Jewett)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: How do you create a shell archive?
Message-ID: <2030002@hpl-opus.HP.COM>
Date: Tue, 22-Sep-87 14:12:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: hpl-opus.2030002
Posted: Tue Sep 22 14:12:32 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Sep-87 00:51:56 EDT
References: <545@clsib21.UUCP>
Organization: HP Labs, Instrument Tech. Dept.
Lines: 23

> Use "bundle" from Kernighan & Pike.  That's essentially what
> I do, and I have yet to hear of anyone having a problem
> extracting sources I've mailed to them.

    For occasional light use for well-controlled inputs, bundle is OK.
    (Bundle is a 10-line shell script that generates a shar of its arguments.)
    Bundle can not perform any sort of error checking during unpacking.

> Many people think that shell archives should protect against
> mailers that mangle files containing (for example) lines
> starting with a dot.  I think the mailers should be fixed.

    Our local shar is written in C, can send binary files, can do error
    checking at the receiving end, and protects against mailer
    stupidity.  It is very nice to be able to shar up arbitrary files.
    The binaries are encoded into printable ASCII, and an unpacking
    program (in C) is included in the shar.  It is possible to shar and
    mail compressed files.

    I agree that the mailers should be fixed, but for now we need robust
    shars.

    Bob