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Name

shell - Interpreter for shell archives

Synopsis

shell [ file... ]

Description

This program interprets enough UNIX shell syntax, and command usage, to enable it to unpack many different types of UNIX shell archives, or ‘‘shar’s.’’ It is primarily intended to be used on non-UNIX systems that need to unpack such archives.

Shell does not check for security holes, and will blithely execute commands like

cp /dev/null /etc/passwd
which, if executed by the super-user, can be disastrous.

The shell parser is line-based, where lines are then split into tokens; it is not a true token-based parser. In general, it is best if all sh keywords that can appear alone on a line do so, and that compound commands (i.e., using a semi-colon) be avoided. For more details on the syntax, see the source (sorry...).

Bugs

It is probably easier to write a true portable replacement for /bin/sh than it is to write something which understands all shar formats.

See Also

shar(1l) .


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