[Unix and Usenet; from /bin/sh archive] A {flatten}ed representation
of a set of one or more files, with the unique property that it can
be unflattened (the original files restored) by feeding it through a
standard Unix shell; thus, a sharchive can be distributed to anyone
running Unix, and no special unpacking software is required.
Sharchives are also intriguing in that they are typically created by
shell scripts; the script that produces sharchives is thus a script
which produces self-unpacking scripts, which may themselves contain
scripts. Sharchives are also commonly referred to as `shar files'
after the name of the most common program for generating them.
The downsides of sharchives are that they are an ideal venue for
{Trojan horse} attacks and that, for recipients not running Unix, no
simple un-sharchiving program is possible; sharchives can and do make
use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features. For these reasons, this
technique has largely fallen out of use since the mid-1990s.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {flat-file}{shar file}]