BTOA(1)BTOA(1)NAME
btoa, atob, tarmail, untarmail - encode/decode binary to printable
ASCII
SYNOPSISbtoa
atob
tarmail who subject files ...
untarmail [ file ]
DESCRIPTION
Btoa is a filter that reads anything from the standard input, and
encodes it into printable ASCII on the standard output. It also
attaches a header and checksum information used by the reverse filter
atob to find the start of the data and to check integrity.
Atob reads an encoded file, strips off any leading and trailing lines
added by mailers, and recreates a copy of the original file on the
standard output. Atob gives NO output (and exits with an error mes‐
sage) if its input is garbage or the checksums do not check.
Tarmail is a shell script that tar's up all the given files, pipes them
through compress, btoa, and mails them to the given person with the
given subject phrase. For example:
tarmail ralph "here it is ralph" foo.c a.out
Will package up files "foo.c" and "a.out" and mail them to "ralph"
using subject "here it is ralph". Notice the quotes on the subject.
They are necessary to make it one argument to the shell.
Tarmail with no args will print a short message reminding you what the
required args are. When the mail is received at the other end, that
person should use mail to save the message in some temporary file name
(say "xx"). Then saying "untarmail xx" will decode the message and
untar it. Untarmail can also be used as a filter. By using tarmail,
binary files and entire directory structures can be easily transmitted
between machines. Naturally, you should understand what tar itself
does before you use tarmail.
Other uses:
compress < secrets | crypt | btoa | mail ralph
will mail the encrypted contents of the file "secrets" to ralph. If
ralph knows the encryption key, he can decode it by saving the mail
(say in "xx"), and then running:
atob < xx | crypt | uncompress
(crypt requests the key from the terminal, and the "secrets" come out
on the terminal).
AUTHOR
Paul Rutter (modified by Joe Orost)
FEATURES
Btoa uses a compact base-85 encoding so that 4 bytes are encoded into 5
characters (file is expanded by 25%). As a special case, 32-bit zero
is encoded as one character. This encoding produces less output than
uuencode(1).
SEE ALSOcompress(1), crypt(1), uuencode(1), mail(1)
local BTOA(1)