WTF is a .shar file???

[CP]

The topic says it all

[Gaccm]

IIRC, its something like tar. I think i dealt with it when i downloaded the quake source. It's a little more powerful than a tarball, since it first gave me a EULA and would only inflate if i said yes (well, for the quake source, it wouldn't inflate at all, i had to edit the file and comment out the question)

[CP]

I am looking for the Quake 2 source now, and can only find .shar.Z files. Do I need to get another utility to extract them or what?

[ 28 June 2001: Message edited by: CP ]

[Craig McPherson]

"SHell ARchive"

You just run it.

It's a self-installing script program.

[Craig McPherson]

The cool thing about Shell Archives is that they can be "uncompressed" using just the shell -- no other tools required (well, yours is gzipped so you'll have to unzip it first).

Basically, a shell archive is just a shell script that recreates files. Let's say you have the following two files, and you want to turn them into a self extracing shell archive:

file1 - "12345678"
file2 - "abcdefgh"

In reality, the files can be massively large, but that's just an example.

A simple shell archive script to to "uncompress" those files looks something like this:

echo "12345678" > file1
echo "abcdefgh" > file2

There are many ways of creating Shell Archives and they can all look very different in terms of how the script looks and works, but they all function the same way -- you just run them.