Really, suntar is becoming two things in one. It's a MacBinary, BinHex, uuencode and PackIt extractor, and it's one of the fastest extractors you can find, and one of the few which may convert more files in one operation (only with drag&drop, by now). That may be enough to let you wish use it. But its original purpose was to communicate, acting as a bridge between a UNIX workstation and the Mac if a few, minimal hardware requirements are met: that is, a physical medium (a mass storage device) must be connected to both machines. That's usually easy with floppy disks but almost any SCSI device may be used instead. Finally, handling devices requires some bookkeeping: this may be seen as a third personality; some time ago I used suntar to resurrect a SyQuest cartridge which, according to Norton Utilities, was completely lost. That's because all available utilities access the disk at a rather high level, and can't solve even the simplest problems arising at a lower level. We believe that programs like suntar meant to communcate should disappear in a future world where any computer will exchange data naturally with any computer, but by now computers and their data are often totally incompatible and suntar is useful.
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