Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!lethe!torsqnt!hybrid!chance!john From: john@chance.UUCP (John R. MacMillan) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: An idea for safer and portable unshar-ing Summary: Include directives for unshar as comments in shar Keywords: shar unshar Message-ID: <1989Sep30.171114.12550@chance.UUCP> Date: 30 Sep 89 17:11:14 GMT Reply-To: john@chance.UUCP (John R. MacMillan) Organization: Haphazard Lines: 27 In order to make it easier for unshar programs to work without using /bin/sh, perhaps we should agree (hah!) upon some keyword directives that shar programs would include as comments. Eg. # FILE filename # NOEXIST # DATA prefix end_delimiter # SIZE [l LINES] [w WORDS] [c CHARS] # CONTINUE filename # EXIST # DECODE how # SUBDIR directory This is just a first shot, but you get the idea. The unpacker could be as paranoid as it wants. If the shar wants to get trickier than the keywords allow, it could, and the unpacker would just not do the tricky parts (perhaps a SKIP or WARN directive). But notice that the above could handle a uuencoded compressed file split across two parts that ends up in a subdirectory. The tough part would be getting people to make their shar programs generate it. -- John R. MacMillan "Don't you miss it...don't you miss it... john@chance.UUCP Some of you people just about missed it." ...!utcsri!hcr!chance!john -- Talking Heads