PAR(1)

📦 version 1.053, in alpine 3.24

💖 PAR(1) 💖

okay bestie, so this is par — a little icon from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of the manual (yes, that's the manual name, and yes, it's a whole vibe) 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

par — literally creates a Perl archive of files 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

par [-s submitter] [-STBqvz] file [files...]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so par creates a Perl archive out of the files you list on the command line. and no cap, the Perl archive is a Perl script — run it and it recreates the files for you, like magic ✨

if any of the files include a path, then the directories in that path get recreated too, so nothing gets lost 🫶

and if any of the files is a directory? the whole contents of that directory get archived. yes, all of it. main character directory energy 👑

⭐ OPTIONS ⭐

par automatically figures out whether files are text or binary, unless you go and use -B or -T. iykyk 😌

  • -B — all files are binary, periodt. Files get encoded with uuencode, and uudecode will be required to recover them. so like, keep that in mind 💀
  • -S — read standard input for files, one file per line, as though they were included on the command line. for example:
find . -name 'chapter[1-9].txt' -print | par -S > story.par
  • -T — all files are text. no encoding necessary, we're chilling 🌸
  • -s submitter — use submitter for the email address included in the par header 🎀
  • -q — shhh! 🤫 (quiet mode, bestie)
  • -v — print version info and exit. bye 👋
  • -z — mimic shar. create a shell archive instead of a Perl archive 🐚

🦋 NOTES 🦋

renaming or linking par to "shar" will cause it to create shell scripts instead. iconic behavior tbh:

ln par shar
shar moogle.txt > moogle.shar

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

shar, unpar, uuencode

👑 AUTHOR 👑

this implementation of par was written by Tim Gim Yee, tim.gim.yee@gmail.com. we stan 🫶

this program is copyright (c) Tim Gim Yee 1999.

this program is free and open software. you may use, modify, distribute, and sell this program (and any modified variants) in any way you wish, provided you do not restrict others from doing the same. that part matters, bestie — don't be that person 🙈

okay that's the whole page, you're welcome 💖 this one's from perl v5.42.2, dated 2026-02-15 — go forth and archive slayfully ✨🎀

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