Re: [TUHS] Traditional method of dealing with embedded shar files

[Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com>]

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shar, by the way, stands for "shell archive."  That is, it's an archive
that could be unpacked by feeding the file into sh.
The most complete unshar is probably at
http://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume15/cshar/  It's portable C
(for its time, 20 years ago). Safety, in terms of not trashing an existing
file, was a goal.


On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 1:59 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 11:54 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 1:25 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> My questions for y'all are how would you go about doing this? Use vi to
>>> delete everything through the ==== cut here line?
>>>
>> Yep
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> In my world, if I screw something up, it's 15 seconds to run a restore
>>> script in my simh directory and I can try again, so my level of concern for
>>> a mistake is pretty low. If I was doing this in 1980, on real hardware, I
>>> would have had many concerns, as I'm sure some of y'all can remember, how
>>> did you prepare and protect yourselves so a patch was successful.
>>>
>> Run an incremental backup and/or copy the files you new you we were
>> messing with.  The good news was that patch makes backups.
>>
>>>
>>> BTW, I thought .shar was an archive format, so when I saw the patch was
>>> a shar file,
>>>
>> It was so of.  It was a way to send files around that people could easily
>> execute and you new would work through 7-bit based email which is all the
>> SMTP guaranteed in the early days.   Yeh but .. uucp was 8 yep.  But
>> some of the legs of the USENET were luck to be based on Arpanet site, which
>> might have had a mailer running BITNET.  When shar was created the 'least
>> needed' style assumptions were used.   As it was it was often that people
>> put tarballs, then compressed them and then uuencoded them inside.  Often a
>> space savings and made it easier -> compressed tar was pretty good, and
>> even with the 3 8-bit chars as 4 6-bit chars of uuencode it will worked out
>> well in practice.
>>
>
> There's various 'unshar' programs, but they are all just restricted
> versions of the shell because of the wide diversity of 'shar'
> implementation...  uuencoded compressed tar balls added another layer to
> this mess as well :)
>
> Warner
>

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