-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Simon Josefsson on 6/27/2005 3:55 PM: > > -w is for encoding, -i for decoding. So they are orthogonal. I > thought about making -w affect decoding to, so decoding would ignore > (only) newlines after COLS. Could be fixed later on.
I would have suggested this as well; I like the thought of -w during encoding adds newline at COL and at EOF, and -w during decoding ignores newline only at COL and EOF. As to your questions on other command line interfaces, I think base64 should at least behave as a filter: base64 < file > file.b64 base64 -d < file.b64 > file As for whether choosing on "base64 abc" whether abc is the filename containing text to be encoded, or the actual text to be encoded, I would lean towards filenames. Consider that your typical input is arbitrary length binary data, and passing that binary data directly as a command line argument is not a typical usage of a textual command line interface. Besides, if you can easily type the input as an ASCII argument, why do you need the 133% size penalty of encoding it? For a single file, it might make sense to support a -o/--output option to specify the name of the output file. Then "base64" would be equivalent to "base64 - -o -". I'm not sure of the best approach for scaling it to multiple input or output files, or if that is even necessary. Does the RFC permit, recommend, or discourage \r\n line endings in base64 encodings? Since the output is printable, you may want to consider carefully the decision between opening the coded file in text vs. binary modes on platforms where they are different. The decoded file must definitely be opened binary. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCwUcK84KuGfSFAYARAhpGAKDX2l8op0WgsDowuuZ0KjJ+RtryKACggnl4 ZyV/YWqKcZopXDJ1sGs08yY= =vfDZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils