Re: Extensions to the `base64' Program

[Stephane Chazelas]

2015-08-31 14:39:57 +0100, Pádraig Brady:
[...]
> > The problem is that `base64' doesn't support the RFC 4648
> > standard.  An obvious work around is to do something akin to
> > "cat <file> | sed 's/-/+/' | sed 's|_|/|' | base64 --decode"
> > or whatever (forgive the double sed please).  However, it
> > would be more GNU-y I think to support the "web" or
> > "url-safe" version of Base64 encoding directly in the
> > program as an extension.
[...]
>   Generally we avoid adding functionality unless it gives
>   a functional advantage to include. That's not the case here
>   and even performance wise, base64 doesn't generally process
>   large amounts of data where the extra data copy would be significant.
>
>   There's talk of adding base32 util, with which
>   it would be nice to keep the same args as base64,
>   and a --url option would be inappropriate there.
[...]

Note that as per RFC 4648, that's a different encoding so if
GNU's going to add another command for base32 encoding, another
base64url one would be needed as well for base64url.

Maybe GNU recode or iconv may be a better choice to add this
kind of encoding functionality.

recode already does base64 encoding as well as others like
quoted-printable.

$ echo test | base64 | recode /b64..
test

-- 
Stephane