shars and security concerns.

[tp at mccall.com]

In article <1203 at chinacat.Unicom.COM>, chip at chinacat.Unicom.COM (Chip Rosenthal) writes:
> In article <518 at cpsolv.CPS.COM> rhg at cpsolv.uucp (Richard H. Gumpertz) writes:
>> [ in response to my flame that smart shar's are evil and rude ]

> For the record, I wish awk weren't in my list.

Me too, because I don't have awk.

> By far the *worst* of the smart shar archives are those which try to be
> cute and split files across multi-part archives so that they are all the
> same length.  This is just anal to the max.  I never used to be able to

I still can't handle them.

> Yes, I can (and do) handle every one of these complexities.  However, you
> reach a point where it's just easier to have a junk system out back to
> do unshar's on rather than providing a utility to do it.

I can't handle most of this stuff. I work on it occasionally. I have a
bunch of shar's I can't unpack yet.

> Now, this isn't an absolute.  The shar's I make aren't just "cat<<'EOF'".
> I do use sed, wc, and test (and mkdir if required).  But that's it.  I also
> justified to myself the added complexity of each "improvement".  I wish
> more folks would.  Keep it simple.  Please?!!??

These I can handle.

> Not rhetorical: would shar format be an appropriate topic for an RFC?

ABSOLUTELY! PLEASE!

I wanted to post this to agree with just about everything Chip said for
entirely different reasons. There is a lot of shar format software posted
to the net that I'd like to use, or at least look at (the README's aren't
always near the beginning. I have a slight problem with shar's, however. I
run VMS (please avoid the temptation to flame VMS, as it is not appropriate
to this discussion). 

I don't have sh, or any of the other utilities. shar format is not
self-unpacking under VMS. I do have an unshar program (came with my uucp,
but I've patched it a little) that can handle simple shar's (I'd guess
about 50% of what I've tried it on). I intend to make it a little better. I
don't intend to emulate or write awk (it can do a little sed, enough to
handle most shar's). 

There is no way I can, or even want to, keep up with all these fancy shar
programs. chroot doesn't buy me anything, and I don't have fgrep, awk, etc.
Anything you add to your shar, I have to be able to write C code to
understand it or I can't unpack your shar. I also don't feel like spending
my life working on shar. I can always unpack it by hand, if it is worth it
(which it rarely is).

I'm not asking you to use shar's that VMS likes. I'm just pointing out
another reason to keep shar's simple. I don't mind using an unshar program
to unpack them, but please don't go out of your way to break the thing.
-- 
Terry Poot <tp at mccall.com>                The McCall Pattern Company
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