This archive contains an OS4 PPC version of the base64 tool. This tool
 encodes/decodes files in the "Base64" format used by MIME-encoded
 documents such as electronic mail messages with embedded images and audio
 files.
 Source code used for this build was obtained from the authors homepage
 at http://www.fourmilab.ch/.


 --
 Martin McKenzie
 email:  marty()cadtechnologies.co.uk
 web:    http://www.cadtechnologies.co.uk

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NAME

 base64 - encode and decode base64 files


SYNOPSIS

 base64 [ -d / -e ] [ options ] [ infile ] [ outfile ]


DESCRIPTION

The MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification (RFC 1341 and
successors) defines a mechanism for encoding arbitrary binary information
for transmission by electronic mail. Triplets of 8-bit octets are encoded as
groups of four characters, each representing 6 bits of the source 24 bits.
Only characters present in all variants of ASCII and EBCDIC are used,
avoiding incompatibilities in other forms of encoding such as
uuencode/uudecode.

base64 is a command line utility which encodes and decodes files in this
format. It can be used within a pipeline as an encoding or decoding filter,
and is most commonly used in this manner as part of an automated mail
processing system.

OPTIONS

-d,
Decodes the input, previously created by base64, to recover the original
input file.

-e,
Encodes the input into an output text file containing its base64 encoding.

-n, --noerrcheck
Suppress error checking when decoding. By default, upon encountering a non
white space character which does not belong to the base64 set, or
discovering the input file is incorrectly padded to a multiple of four
characters, base64 issues an error message and terminates processing with
exit status 1. The -n option suppresses even this rudimentary error
checking; invalid characters are silently ignored and the output truncated
to the last three valid octets if the input is incorrectly padded.

-u, -?
Print how to call information and a summary of options.


LIMITATIONS

Little or no error checking is done when decoding, other than validating
that the input consists of a multiple of four characters in the encoding
set. This is inherent in the design of base64, which assumes transmission
integrity is the responsibility of a higher-level protocol.

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