A readable, robust encoding for source postings

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

In article <1990Dec29.114801.5895 at Daisy.EE.UND.AC.ZA> Alan P. Barrett writes:
> [...]
>I think that the correct way to fix this is to use an encoding that is
>both readable and robust.  A version of shar that does stuff like
>encoding tabs as \t and wrapping lines in a reversible way would do it.
>In fact, there was a lot of discussion on this topic here several months
>ago.  Sorry, I don't remember details, but I thought that somebody was
>going to do some real work on coming up with a suitable standard?

I posted my genfiles program which I hoped would be a jumpimg off point for
such an effort.  Has anyone looked at it and have suggestions to enhance
the protocols I suggested?

Here is the Readme from the distribution:

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This is my file generation utility.  The genfiles program reads in a
script from the standard input and creates files based on the contents.
There is some parameter substitution as well.  The mkscript program is
an easy way of creating the scripts used by genfiles.  See the source
files for further details.

These programs are being offered as a possible solution to problems of
transfering files between different networks without changing them.  The
utilities in this distribution were originally written for different
purposes and have been hacked on in order to make a start on some sort of
solution.  Some of the issues addressed (and hopefully solved) are:

    The lines can be split if desired and restored on the receiving end.

    Many troublesome characters are translated to less troublesome ones
    and restored on the receiving end.

    The files are transmitted in a form that can be read without any
    further processing.  This is ***NOT*** a uuencoding type program.

    By modifying the code, systems that need some characters converted
    to trigraphs can do so by simply commenting out the case statement
    that converts the troublesome character(s).

What it doesn't have yet is multi-part support other than splitting
up the resulting file and restoring it by hand.  I will try to do
something about this.

It also doesn't unpack itself like shar files do but the program is
fairly simple and can easily be written for systems that can't use
this one for some reason.

In order to use the program that creates the script file you either
have to pick up my getarg program which I recently posted or else
hack the source to use normal getopt.  If you can't get getarg from
a local archive site you can get it from my machine's mail server.
Send mail to unix-server at druid.UUCP with the following line in the
body of the message:

send getarg.c

Note if the mail to the server gets too heavy I will have to shut it
down for my neighbours sake so please use it as a last resort.  This
is just a lowly leaf node with a single 2400 baud modem.

The program to unpack the files is self contained.

D'Arcy J.M. Cain
D'Arcy Cain Consulting
West Hill, Ontario
darcy at druid.UUCP
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D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy at druid)     |
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West Hill, Ontario, Canada         |   like no government!
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