share

n 1: any of the equal portions into which the capital stock of a

corporation is divided and ownership of which is

evidenced by a stock certificate; "he bought 100 shares

of IBM at the market price"

2: an asset belonging to or due to or contributed by an

individual person or group; "he wanted his share in cash"

[syn: {portion}, {part}, {percentage}]

3: the result of parcelling out or sharing; "death gets more

than its share of attention from theologicans" [syn: {parcel},

{portion}]

4: any one of a number of individual efforts in a common

endeavor: "I am proud of my contribution to the team's

success"; "they all did their share of the work" [syn: {contribution},

{part}]

5: a sharp steel wedge that cuts loose the top layer of soil

[syn: {plowshare}, {ploughshare}]

v 1: share in common; "Our children share a love of music"

2: use jointly or in common

3: have, give, or receive a share of: "We shared the cake"

[syn: {partake}, {partake in}]

4: give out as one's portion or share [syn: {divvy up}, {portion

out}, {apportion}, {deal}]

5: communicate; "I'd like to share this idea with you"

shar

("Shell archive", after {ar} and {tar})

Any of the many {Unix} programs that creates a {flatten}ed

representation of one or more files, with the unique property

that it can be unflattened (the original files extracted)

merely by feeding it through a standard {Unix} {shell}. The

output of shar, known as a "shar file" or "sharchive", can be

distributed to anyone running {Unix}, and no special unpacking

software is required.

Sharchives are 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. The disadvantage 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 and other Unix

commands.

Different implementations of shar vary in sophistication.

Some just {uuencode} each input file and output commands to

{uudecode} the result, others include extensive checking to

make sure the files have been transferred without corruption

and that all parts of a multi-file sharchive have been

unpacked.

The {unshar} utility strips off mail and news headers before

passing the remainder of its input to sh.

(1996-10-18)