Details
While the shar format has the advantage of being plain text, it poses a risk due to being executable; for this reason the older and more general tar file format is usually preferred even for transferring text files. GNU provides its own version of shar in the GNU Sharutils collection.
unshar programs have been written for other operating systems but are not always reliable; shar files are shell scripts and can theoretically do anything that a shell script can do (including using incompatible features of enhanced or workalike shells), limiting their utility outside the Unix world.
The drawback of self-extracting shell scripts (any kind, not just shar) is that they rely on a particular implementation of programs; shell archives created with older versions of makeself, for example the original Unreal Tournament for Linux installer, fails to run on bash 3.x due to a change in how missing arguments to trap built-in command are handled.
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