RE: Extract / Insert text files

John,

It took about 30 minutes to write but quite a few hours to debug and test
to check out the many variations of such an archive.  It is a
self-extracting,
script which wraps extraction and insertion of text files of which they
themselves may be extracted scripts.

It is documented in POD and represents a way to load into our current script
archive any combination of text files as a self-extracting script.  The
self-
extraction portion is only 35 lines which I left as clear un-obfuscated
code.

perl extract.pl -- extracts insert.pl and test.pl
perl test.pl    -- tests extraction and insertion
perl insert.pl myTextBall *.doc *.pl *.pm -- inserts all text into a
self-extracting
  text...ball

I think it would encourage the scripters to submit more because they will
not be
limited to one all-inclusive-script.

Since it is just text, perldoc reads all the pod right out of the archive.

Sincerely,

David

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Nolan [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Monday, March 06, 2000 7:10 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Extract / Insert text files
> 
> 
> > 
> > I think we have waited too long for some tar ball concept 
> to wrap up sets of
> > files.
> 
> I agree. 
> 
> >  
> > In fact, all we need is something to wrap a small set of text files.
> 
> Your idea kind of sounds like a shell archive. 
> 
> It's not a bad idea, but I still think a better idea is to
> just retrofit the existing CPAN mechanism for module tarballs
> for use with script tarballs.  How hard can this be? 
> 
> -- 
> #-------------------------
> # John Nolan
> # jpnolan sonic net
> #-------------------------
>