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Miscellaneous considerations

Here is a place-holder for many considerations which do not fit elsewhere, while not worth a section for themselves.

Be careful that the output file(s) are not included in the inputs or shar may loop until the disk fills up. Be particularly careful when a directory is passed to shar that the output files are not in that directory (or a subdirectory of that directory).

When a directory is passed to shar, it may be scanned more than once, to conserve memory. Therefore, one should be careful to not change the directory contents while shar is running.

No attempt is made to restore the protection and modification dates for directories, even if this is done by default for files. Thus, if a directory is given to shar, the protection and modification dates of corresponding unpacked directory may not match those of the original.

Use of the -M or -B options will slow down the archive process. Use of the -z or -Z options may slow the archive process considerably.

Let us conclude by a showing a few examples of shar usage:

shar *.c > cprog.shar
shar -Q *.[ch] > cprog.shar
shar -B -l28 -oarc.sh. *.arc
shar -f /lcl/src/u*.c > u.sh

The first shows how to make a shell archive out of all C program sources. The second produces a shell archive with all `.c' and `.h' files, which unpacks silently. The third gives a shell archive of all uuencoded `.arc' files, into files `arc.sh.01' through to `arc.sh.nnn'. The last example gives a shell archive which will use only the file names at unpack time.

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