UUENCODE(1) BSD General Commands Manual UUENCODE(1)NAME
uuencode, uudecode — encode/decode a binary file
SYNOPSISuuencode [-m] [inputfile] outputname
uudecode [-m | -p] [encoded-file ...]
DESCRIPTIONuuencode 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 ALSOgzip(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
