sharchive

/sharki:v/ , n. [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.

