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From: wohler@milk1.istc.sri.com..istc.sri.com (Bill Wohler)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: File headers on shar files
Message-ID: <10908@sri-spam.istc.sri.com>
Date: Mon, 7-Dec-87 23:35:30 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-spam.10908
Posted: Mon Dec  7 23:35:30 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 13-Dec-87 02:52:26 EST
References: <393@ddsw1.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@sri-spam.istc.sri.com
Reply-To: wohler@milk1.istc.sri.com.UUCP (Bill Wohler)
Organization: SRI International
Lines: 31
Keywords: headers, comp.sources, source postings, shars

Karl Denninger writes:
>I therefore propose that in the future, when sources (or any other 'shar'
>file) is posted, that the powers that be place any needed 'introduction'
>that preceeds the shar into the file in such a way that it will not
>interfere with the attempts of myself (and I bet others as well) to automate
>or simplify this unpacking.  This can be assured by simply insuring that the
>first character of each line is a "#", making it a shell comment line.

  also, if "tarmail" of the compress family had been made the de-facto
  standard of shipping sources, then you wouldn't have to have even
  written your script--atob would ignore all the leading garbage.  

  for those not in the know, tarmail is a filter which essentially does:

	tar | compress | btoa | mail

  compress makes the distributions smaller, which would make uucp sites
  much happier (often cuts source by almost one half). [ab]to[ba] does a 
  better job than uu{en,de}code, and is not setuid to uucp which makes it 
  easier to debinary things.

  if there aren't any machines that compress doesn't run on, perhaps
  shar could be phased out...

  if interested, compress.shar, which includes atob, btoa, tarmail, 
  and compressdir, can be ftped from spam.istc.sri.com. 
  i'd be happy to mail it too.  i encourage other folks who maintain
  compress.shar in their pub directories to update their version (like 
  j.cc.purdue.edu).

						--bw
						wohler@istc.sri.com