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Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

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Introduction to both programs

GNU shar makes so-called shell archives out of many files, preparing them for transmission by electronic mail services. A shell archive is a collection of files that can be unpacked by /bin/sh. A wide range of features provide extensive flexibility in manufacturing shars and in specifying shar smartness. See section Invoking the shar program.

GNU unshar scans mail messages looking for the start of a shell archive. It then logically removes mail headers and other crum, then passes the body of the archive through a copy of the shell to unpack it. It can process multiple files at once. It may also process files containing concatenated shell archives. See section Invoking the unshar program.

The core of both programs is initially derived from the public domain version 3.49 which was available in 1990, with more recent changes by Pinard and other volunteers on the Internet. Some modules and other code sections are freely borrowed from other GNU distributions, bringing shar under the terms of the GNU General Public License. All names and email addresses can be found in the file `THANKS' from the GNU shar distribution.

Your feedback will help us to make a better and more portable product. Mail suggestions and bug reports (including documentation errors) for these programs to `bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu'.

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