🚀 go-pugleaf

> Can someone out there tell me where I can find a shell-archiving program?
> What I really need is a program which will un-shell-archive files. There
> are several things in comp.sources.unix I want to look at, but they are
> shell-archived, and I can't un-do them. Any info would be appreciated.
> Thanks very much,
>
> Arnie Elkins

Well, there's always the MKB (Monkey with KeyBoard :-) un-shell-archiver.
Sit down with your favorite text editor and split the shell archive by hand.

For all the shell archives I've seen, it shouldn't be difficult, just a mite
bit tedious.  If you know Un*x, you'll readily see what the 'cat's and 'sed's
were supposed to do.  Even if you don't, looking at the file and a little 
meditation should lead to a train of thought along the following lines:
"Hmm... this seems to want to make a file called 'Foo.c'... yeah, this looks
like C code, but there's an X stuck on the front of each line...  well, if
I copy the file to 'Foo.c', delete all the lines from the beginning to HERE
and from THERE to the end, and then delete all those leading X's...
yeah, that should do it..."

The whole point is that sometimes we get too tied down to having the computer
do all our work for us.  (Ever hunt for your calculator just to add two 2-digit
numbers?  I know I have.)  Just because something could be done easier and
faster on a computer, it doesn't mean that it CAN'T be done WITHOUT one.

I hope you find a un-shell-archiver, they're nice things. (I believe one may
have been posted to comp.sources.unix a while back, but that just leads you
back to the original problem, plus the work of porting it.)  But if the
shell archive contains something you'd really like to have a look at,
you might want to consider spending half an hour with an editor splitting
it manually instead of waiting a week or more to get an un-archiver to
get the computer to split it for you.  Either way, good luck.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
William R. Somsky                          Physics Dept ; Princeton Univ
wrs@pupthy.Princeton.EDU                 PO Box 708 ; Princeton NJ 08544