1. Introduction to this toolset

GNU uuencode and uudecode have an history which roots are lost in ages, and we will not even try to trace it. The current versions were brought into GNU by Ian Lance Taylor, and later modernized by Ulrich Drepper. GNU shar surely has a long history, too. All along this long road, numerous users contributed various improvements. The file ‘THANKS’ in the distribution, as far as we know, contain the names of all contributors we could identify, and for which email addresses are seemingly valid.

Please help us getting the history straight, for the following information is somewhat approximative. James Gosling wrote the public domain shar 1.x. William Davidsen rewrote it as shar 2.x. Warren Tucker implemented modifications and called it shar 3.x. Richard Gumpertz maintained it until 1990. François Pinard, from the public domain shar 3.49, made GNU shar 4.x, in 1994. Some modules and other code sections were freely borrowed from other GNU distributions, bringing this shar under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The few wrapper scripts have been contributed more recently by François Pinard, just as an attempt for making this GNU sharutils toolset more useful.

Your feedback helps us to make a better and more portable product. Mail suggestions and bug reports (including documentation errors) for these programs to ‘bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu’.

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