Re: base64 tool?

[Brian Dessent]

Simon Josefsson wrote:

> > As for whether choosing on "base64 abc" whether abc is the filename
> > containing text to be encoded, or the actual text to be encoded, I would
> > lean towards filenames.
> 
> Me too.  The tool started out as a debugging tool for me, but it is
> not the typical use.  And 'base64 -s foo' is simple for short tests.
> Or should it be 'base64 -e foo'?  To match 'grep -e ...' or 'perl -e
> ...'.  'foo' is a string here, not a filename.

IMHO it should not accept input strings as a command line argument at
all.  If you want to accept short strings you can always do 'echo foo |
base64 -' or similar.  In your examples of perl/sed/grep those all take
program/script code (or in the case of grep, a regular expression, a
type of program) as parameters, which is not the same as the input
stream to be processed.

Brian