Copyright (C) 1994 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.
GNU shar makes so-called shell archives out of many files,
preparing them for transmission by electronic mail services.
A shell archive is a collection of files that can be unpacked by
/bin/sh. A wide range of features provide extensive flexibility
in manufacturing shars and in specifying shar smartness. For
example, shar may compress files, uuencode binary files, split
long files and construct multi-part mailings, ensure correct unsharing
order, and provide simplistic checksums. See section Invoking the shar program.
GNU unshar scans a set of mail messages looking for the start
of shell archives. It will automatically strip off the mail headers
and other introductory text. The archive bodies are then unpacked by
a copy of the shell. unshar may also process files containing
concatenated shell archives. See section Invoking the unshar program.
GNU shar has a long history. All along this long road, numerous
users contributed various improvements. The file `THANKS', from
the GNU shar distribution, contain all names still having
valid email addresses, as far as we know.
Please help me getting the history straight, for the following
information is approximative. James Gosling wrote the public domain
shar 1.x. William Davidsen rewrote it as shar 2.x.
Warren Tucker brought modifications and called it shar 3.x.
Richard Gumpertz maintained it until 1990. Pinard,
from the public domain shar 3.49, made GNU shar 4.x,
in 1994. Some modules and other code sections were freely borrowed
from other GNU distributions, bringing this shar under the
terms of the GNU General Public License.
Your feedback helps us to make a better and more portable product. Mail suggestions and bug reports (including documentation errors) for these programs to `bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu'.