Subject: A terribly automatic directory tree mailer/receiver

From: Glenn Linderman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1993 14:21:54 -0800 (PST)

Having inspiration from Stephen's clever technique for sending
procmail to user's that do not have procmail, I then begged the script
from him.  And then I realized that, while clever, it had a different
goal than what I wanted.  I wanted a script that would be appropriate
to give to others, so that when they used it, I could very easily (one
command) put the files they send back together.

For portability, this uses only very commonly available UNIX tools, in
particular, it uses awk, uuencode/uudecode, compress/uncompress, and
tar.  These seem to be universally available.

The package consists of 3 files:

  bin/mailit:  This script is used to package and EMail a whole
               directory tree to some EMail address.

               As part of the first file, an abbreviated version of
               the bin/unmailit script is included.  Hence, you can
               use the script even for people who don't know about
               this package, because the first part they receive is
               self-contained, with unpacking instructions and script.

               The above was inspired by Stephen's script, but I
               didn't actually use any of his script.

  bin/unmailit:  This script is called to put the stripped files
                 generated above back together again.

                 While not actually needed, if you have a copy of this
                 script, you can use it to unpack incoming packages
                 created by bin/mailit without following all the
                 instructions for editing the first file to turn it
                 into a script.

  bin/.procmailrc:  This recipe handles the incoming mail.
                    Each file is stored separately, so that the
                    file system can correctly order them, and a
                    "for" loop can be used put them back together.

So basically, one convinces one's friends to use "mailit" to send them
stuff.  Then you wait for mailit's messages.  The first tells you how
many messages are expected.  Then you execute the "unmailit" script to
recreate the directory tree that they sent you.

To obtain the package, send me an EMail with the
Subject: get mailit

I provide it this way, so you can discover for yourself if it is easy
to use, by receiving it from itself.

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