Could we have a standard "shar" file format?

[Frederick M. Avolio]

In article <314 at well.UUCP>, dv at well.UUCP (David W. Vezie) writes:
> 	Could I propose a "standard" for articles posted to all.sources?
Not only can you ... you did!

>       1, entire article is a shar file

Good idea -- has to be done by poster, not in software

>       2, the order of the files in the shar file are as such: ...

Why?  I don't see why it matters as long as they are in there.  Why
order the files?  I say "shar * > ~/sharfile"

> 	3, even if it is one file, package it as a shar file with a
>          README.  ...

Very good idea -- again, has to be done by poster, not in software

> 	4, use a shell archiver that puts an "exit 0" at the end of
> 	   the article (before the .signature).

Gary Perlman's does this as well as puts time stamp, user name, etc. in a
shell comment and allows one to create a shar file that checks character
counts, etc. at unshar time.  Remember, Gary's is one that people scoffed
at because it is a "complicated" C program instead of the simple 8 liner
distributed with news software:

	for i
	do
		echo "echo x - $i"
		echo "sed 's/^X//' >$i <<'*-*-END-of-$i-*-*'"
		sed 's/^/X/' $i
		echo "*-*-END-of-$i-*-*"
	done
	echo exit

The above can easily be changed to add an exit 0 line.  But Gary's is fast
and has some nice features.  And that is why I like it.  That and, as Gary
said in a recent magazine article, it's nice to be mentioned on the manual
page :-) !
-- 
Fred @ DEC Ultrix Applications Center    {decvax,seismo,cbosgd}!decuac!avolio