1. Introduction to both programs

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. No value for Francois 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'.

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