sharchive: /shar'ki:v/ n. [Unix and Usenet; from /bin/sh
archive] A flattened 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. (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.) Sharchives are also
commonly referred to as `shar files' after the name of the most
common program for generating them.
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