According to the BSD man pages, tar first appeared in Version 7 UNIX in 1979, but shar first appeared in 4.4BSD, which was released in 1994.
What were the perceived advantages to shar at the time? Shar introduces a host of security issues since it's just executing a lengthy shell script. Why would this tool be introduced when tar already provided similar functionality?
Best Answer
Depending on the source (and weight you may attach),
shar
dates back to around 1980. In a form which you might recognize, that comes from Rich Salz's implementation introduced in 1988, and improved in stages over the next few years.shar
was originally a convenience for bundling text files. uuencoding (a way to send binary files) has been around at least as long: I see it in 2.0BSD, dated 1989 with the manual page saying it was written by Mark Horton. It was in use withshar
in the 1980s, though the earliest use in combination withshar
is elusive. TheREADME
in Rich Salz's 1988 version ofcshar
states:However, William Davidsen's concurrent (a month earlier)
shar2
in comp.sources.misc (Volume 3, Issue 14) supported uuencode.Further reading: