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

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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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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