Unnecessary tar-compress-uuencodes

[tp at mccall.com]

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? 

Do any shar utilities out there do this? Anyone want to guess if supporting
it will cause more problems than it solves (assuming the conflict in the
previous paragraph)?
-- 
Terry Poot <tp at mccall.com>                The McCall Pattern Company
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