Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

In article <3131.26a188ca at mccall.com> tp at mccall.com writes:
>In article <1990Jul13.161441.8339 at druid.uucp>, darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>> In article <3124 at psueea.UUCP> kirkenda at eecs.UUCP (Steve Kirkendall) writes:
>>>4) The archive program should split long lines when the archive is created,
>>>   and rejoin them during extraction.
>> Modify shar to do this.  All it would take is to put a '\' if the line goes
>> beyond a certain point and continue on the next line.  The shell will put it
>> back together properly.
>
>Technical question from one who maintains a VMS unshar util. Is this true?
>What happens if you have a line of text in the actual file that ends with a
>'\', which is common, for instance, in long #defines in C source? Will
>current shar/unshar programs fold this into a single line? If not, what is
>the difference with what you said above? 
>
You're right.  I usually try things out before posting statements like that
but I missed that one.  The text between "<< SHAR_EOF" and the end of input
text is of course not interpreted by the shell like the commands are.  The
shar program would need a little more work than I suggested above.

I am going to post my genfiles utility.  This is a pair of programs that I
use for generating ASCII files on multiple systems.  I will modify it to
include support for breaking long lines before posting it.  Perhaps the net
would like to look at this as a starting point for some kind of standard
distribution method.  I only have access to Unix and MSDOS so I can't say
if it is suitable for other systems.  It does allow stuff to be transmitted
in clear readable text.  Since I expect I will get many suggestions for
improvements should I post to both alt.sources and comp.sources or should
I hold the c.s posting till I have a more finished product?

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D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy at druid)     |   Government:
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