UUENCODE(1) General Commands Manual UUENCODE(1)

NAME

uuencode, uudecodeencode/decode a binary file

SYNOPSIS

uuencode [-m] [inputfile] outputname

uudecode [-m] [-p | -o outputfile] [encoded-file ...]

DESCRIPTION

uuencode and uudecode are used to transmit binary files over transmission mediums that do not support other than simple ASCII data.

The following options are available:

-m
Use base64 encoding. The default is that uuencode uses the historical uuencode algorithm, and uudecode automatically detects the encoding.
-o outputname
(uudecode only.) Use the specified outputname as the name of the output file. The default is that uudecode obtains the name of the output file from the data stream, where uuencode would have recorded it.
-p
(uudecode only.) Write the decoded file to stdout instead of to a named file.

uuencode reads inputfile (or by default the standard input) and writes an encoded version to the standard output. The encoding uses only printing ASCII characters and includes the mode of the file and the operand outputname for use by uudecode.

uudecode transforms uuencoded files (or by default, the standard input) into the original form. The resulting file is named outputname as recorded in the encoded file, or as specified by the -o option, and will have the mode of the original file except that setuid and execute bits are not retained. If the -p option is specified, or if the output file name is given as /dev/stdout, then the data will be written to the standard output instead of to a named file. uudecode ignores any leading and trailing lines.

EXIT STATUS

The uudecode and uuencode utilities exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

The following example packages up a source tree, compresses it, uuencodes it and mails it to a user on another system.

tar czf - src_tree | uuencode src_tree.tgz | mail user@example.com

On the other system, if the user saves the mail to the file temp, the following example creates the file src_tree.tgz and extracts it to make a copy of the original tree.

uudecode temp 
tar xzf src_tree.tgz

SEE ALSO

gzip(1), mail(1), tar(1), uuencode(5)

STANDARDS

The uudecode and uuencode utilities conform to IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”).

HISTORY

The uudecode and uuencode utilities appeared in 4.0BSD.

BUGS

The encoded form of the file is expanded by 35% (3 bytes become 4 plus control information).
January 28, 2012 NetBSD 6.99