PACKAGE |STAT Data Manipulation and Analysis, by Gary Perlman
NAME fpack - pack and unpack ascii files with simple archiving scheme
USAGE fpack [-fv] [files]
DESCRIPTION fpack is a simple plain-text-file archiving scheme to either reduce the number of files or to package them together. It is designed to be portable to systems between which files may be transferred, such as between UNIX and MSDOS. It can save space on systems that use disk blocks for files that occupy a small part of a block. One of the program's requirements is that it does not alter the format of its input, so files like documents or human readable data files are not converted to a special format. This allows unpacking by hand in an emergency (e.g., the recipient of an archive does not have fpack to unpack).

Files are delimited by a special string at the start of a line: 

fpack:!@#$%^&*():   <filename>
OPTIONS
-f
Forceful action. fpack will overwrite existing files it is unpacking and continue when it can't open files.
-v
Verbose output. fpack will name the files it packs or unpacks.
The following standard help options are supported. The program exits after displaying the help.
-L
Display limits
-O
Display options and values
-V
Display version number and date
NOTES Text outside file delimiters in an archive will be ignored. So, files packed and sent through mailers that add header lines and trailing signatures will be unpacked safely.

If a file does not end with a newline character, one will be silently added.

If a file to be unpacked exists, then it will not be overwritten. Instead, the packed contents for the file(s) being unpacked will be ignored.

EXAMPLES Pack up some C source files. 
fpack *.c > archive
Unpack all files. 
fpack < archive
UPDATED November 2, 1987