SHELL ARCHIVER security (was: ... requested)

[Robert Hartman]

In article <1991Jun25.055549.26282 at noose.ecn.purdue.edu> luj at gus17.ecn.purdue.edu (Jun Lu) writes:
>There are quite a few free versions/flavors of shell archivers floating
>around. Which one do you use ? Which do you recommend ? Comparisons of
>efficiecy(small, fast) v.s. portability are welcomed ?  Any other facts are
>also appreciated. If there is sufficient interest, I'll post a summary.
> ...
>Thanks very much for your time and help.
>-- Jun

This came up way back when comp.os.minix was new.

One thing to consider is safety.  If the shar goes haywire you don't
want it trashing your files (or creating things like .rhosts files).
The vanilla shar in K&R works well, and it's a great example of a
recursive script to traverse a file hierarchy, but it doesn't do
anything to insure that the shell commands it uses to unpack the files
won't wreak havoc.

The safer archivers generate sed scripts rather than shell scripts.
Their disadvantage is that the raw archives tend to be bigger and a
bit less easily read.

-r