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Re: Feature request - base64 Filename Safe Alphabet
From: |
Simon Josefsson |
Subject: |
Re: Feature request - base64 Filename Safe Alphabet |
Date: |
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:05:07 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.110009 (No Gnus v0.9) Emacs/22.2 (gnu/linux) |
Christopher Kerr <address@hidden> writes:
> After being burned by using `head -c6 /dev/urandom | base64` as part of a
> directory name, I realised that it would be useful if base64 had an option to
> generate URL and Filename safe encodings, as specified in RFC 3548 section 4.
>
> This would make
> cat FILE | base64 --filename-safe
> equivalent to
> cat FILE | base64 | tr '+/' '-_'
> using the current coreutils tools.
I think --filename-safe is a good idea. The documentation should
discuss the potential for generating files starting with '-' or '--'.
Patching gnulib's base64.c to support an arbitrary alphabet seems messy.
Patches welcome though.
Regarding the discussion of different characters to use, let me add that
'+' is not a URI safe character, so it would be unsafe from that aspect.
I believe the parameter name clash is the least problematic consequence
that we can chose.
/Simon
- Re: Feature request - base64 Filename Safe Alphabet,
Simon Josefsson <=