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sharchive

   n. 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.