My overnight activity on New Year's Eve was to rewrite the #uuencode utility that I lost in a battery-exhaustion incident. The old version was in #Forth, the new version in #LuaLang. Including interpreter size, the Lua version is 100x larger and 100x slower. I was not intending to provide a case study upholding Jeff Fox's writings about Forth efficiency, but there you go.

The next #Forth program I write on the HP #200LX will be #uuencode / #uudecode so I can transfer binary files to/from hosts that don't support #zmodem. #HP200LX

Does anyone know of a multi-file streaming archiving tool that can accept input from pipes, FIFOs, or commands? #tar can do what I want for output with -O, but not on input, because each file's header contains a size, which of course wouldn't be known for streaming input. Must be able to separate files back out again on the other end.

The closest I've come is #uuencode, which can concatenate output and #uudecode will identify the individual components - but of course it has a space penalty.