Why can't I do this: uuencode -m /mnt/kd/xyz/myfile.csv > stuff ?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Wed Feb 22 21:27:13 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 22 February 2006 3:16 pm, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > On Wednesday 22 February 2006 1:43 pm, Angus Comber wrote:
>  > > Yes I tried that but cursor is waiting for something.  ie command
>  > > doesn't return.
>  >
>  > Ah.
>  >
>  > You're right, it's insisting you give it a file on the command line, but
>  > where it's actually _getting_ the data from is stdin.
>  >
>  > cat README | ./busybox uuencode -m README
>  >
>  > That's stupid and evil.  Does anybody actually use this thing and know
>  > what the expected behavior is?  (I can change what it's doing now pretty
>  > easily, but I'm wondering who would be inconvenienced by that...)
>
> uuencode has always worked this way.
>
> the usage (from "man uuencode") is:
>        uuencode [-m] [ file ] name
> "name" is simply the string that will be emitted as part of the
> first line of output.  it isn't a filename on the current system,
> but will be used as the filename on the decoding system.  "file"
> is used in place of stdin.
>
> the usage from "busybox uuencode" is:
>     Usage: uuencode [OPTION] [INFILE] REMOTEFILE
>
> i think busybox is doing the right thing.

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/uuencode.html

I think uuencode is hideously mis-designed, but since I haven't used it in 
about seven years, have no plans to start now, and mainstream distros don't 
even ship it anymore (Red Hat 7.2 did, Red Hat 9 doesn't, and it not on any 
ubuntu) I can't really say I care.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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