netbsd man page for uuencode

UUENCODE(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 					       UUENCODE(1)

NAME
     uuencode, uudecode -- encode/decode a binary file

SYNOPSIS
     uuencode [-m] [inputfile] outputname
     uudecode [-m | -p] [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.

     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, and will have the mode of the original file except that setuid and execute bits are not retained; if the -p
     option is specified, the data will be written to the standard output instead.  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 1003.2-1992 (``POSIX.2'').

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).

BSD
								 November 30, 2008							       BSD