2.1.6 Producing different kinds of shars

-V

--vanilla-operation

This option produces vanilla shars which rely only upon the existence of echo, test and sed in the unpacking environment.

The -V disables options offensive to the network cop (or brown shirt). It also changes the default from mixed mode -M to text mode -T. Warnings are produced if option -B, -z, -j, -Z, -p or -M is specified (any of which does or might require uudecode, gzip, bzip2 or compress in the unpacking environment).

-P

--no-piping

In the shar file, use a temporary file to hold the file to uudecode, instead of using pipes. This option is mandatory when you know the unpacking uudecode is unwilling to merely read its standard input. Richard Marks wrote what is certainly the most (in)famous of these, for MSDOS :-).

(Here is a side note from the maintainer. Why isnt't this option the default? In the past history of shar, it was decided that piping was better, surely because it is less demanding on disk space, and people seem to be happy with this. Besides, I think that the uudecode from Richard Marks, on MSDOS, is wrong in refusing to handle stdin. So far that I remember, he has the strong opinion that a program without any parameters should give its --help output. Besides that, should I say, his uuencode and uudecode programs are full-featured, one of the most complete set I ever saw. But Richard will not release his sources, he wants to stay in control.)

-x

--no-check-existing

Overwrite existing files without checking. If neither -x nor -X is specified, when unpacking itself, the shell archive will check for and not overwrite existing files (unless -c is passed as a parameter to the script when unpacking).

-X

--query-user

Interactively overwrite existing files.

Use of -X produces shars which will cause problems with some unshar-style procedures, particularily when used together with vanilla mode (-V). Use this feature mainly for archives to be passed among agreeable parties. Certainly, -X is not for shell archives which are to be submitted to Usenet or other public networks.

The problem is that unshar programs or procedures often feed `/bin/sh' from its standard input, thus putting `/bin/sh' and the shell archive script in competition for input lines. As an attempt to alleviate this problem, shar will try to detect if `/dev/tty' exists at the receiving site and will use it to read user replies. But this does not work in all cases, it may happen that the receiving user will have to avoid using unshar programs or procedures, and call /bin/sh directly. In vanilla mode, using `/dev/tty' is not even attempted.

-m

--no-timestamp

Avoid generating touch commands to restore the file modification dates when unpacking files from the archive.

When the timestamp relationship is not preserved, some files like `configure' or `*.info' may be uselessly remade after unpacking. This is why, when this option is not used, a special effort is made to restore timestamps,

-Q

--quiet-unshar

Verbose off at unshar time. Disables the inclusion of comments to be output when the archive is unpacked.

-f

--basename

Use only the last file name component of each input file name, ignoring any prefix directories. This is sometimes useful when building a shar from several directories, or another directory. If a directory name is passed to shar, the substructure of that directory will be restored whether -f is specified or not.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on June, 3 2006 using texi2html 1.76.