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From: campbell@maynard.UUCP (Larry Campbell)
Newsgroups: net.sources.d
Subject: Re: Posting compressed info
Message-ID: 
Date: Sun, 31-Aug-86 23:13:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: maynard.342
Posted: Sun Aug 31 23:13:10 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Sep-86 03:51:38 EDT
References:    
Reply-To: campbell@maynard.UUCP (Larry Campbell)
Organization: The Boston Software Works Inc., Maynard, MA
Lines: 33
Keywords: shar

In article  bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Robert Montante) writes:
>As a final follow-up to all that, I would like someone in the know to explain
>'shar' postings to me.  As far as I can see they merely repackage text files
>into a slightly different text format, and they seem to cost a percent or so
>in size.  What advantage am I unaware of that makes them worth the effort?

"shar" postings are shell scripts that can be fed directly to the
shell.  Thus, with one simple command, you can get your news-reading
program to automatically split the posting up into files and
directories.  If it's just a single file, it's true that there's not
much point (except uniformity).  But when the posting consists of
three or four directories containing fifteen or twenty files, it sure
is nice to be able to say "s | sh" and have the files pop into
existence.  The alternative, picking the files apart by hand with an
editor, would be a royal pain.

In addition, some flavors of shar postings contain consistency checks
that help detect whether the files have been munged somehow in transit.
Shar postings also can set permission bits so that, for example, shell
scripts are made executable, saving you the trouble of doing it by hand.

And finally, most versions of shar prepend an 'X' to the start of
each line.  This helps prevent mungage by certain brain-damaged mail
software that truncates messages at any lines containing only a single
period.  Remember that Usenet postings must often traverse some pretty
convoluted and unreliable paths before they reach certain readers.

These are the reasons that shar postings are, and ought to be, the
de facto standard for posting files in net.sources.
-- 
Larry Campbell                             The Boston Software Works, Inc.
ARPA: campbell%maynard.uucp@harvard.ARPA   120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
UUCP: {alliant,wjh12}!maynard!campbell     (617) 367-6846