On 2008-03-21 at 08:45 +0100, Olivier wrote:
> Here http://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch33.html ,
> you can read :
>
> If you have the *mimencode* command installed, another way to do produce
> base64-encoded strings is to run the command
>
> echo -e -n `\0user\0password' | mimencode
>
> The *-e* option of *echo* enables the interpretation of backslash escapes in
> the argument, and the *-n* option specifies no newline at the end of its
> output. However, not all versions of *echo* recognize these options, so you
> should check your version before relying on this suggestion.
>
> Would it be possible to add a small example, so that readers can be certain
> their version of echo recognize these options ?
> I was thinking of :
I believe that the printf(1) command is fairly portable. POSIX.2 at
least. This should provide the most certainty instead of digressing
into a discussion of different implementations of echo.
Just don't push the \0 in as a parameter, keep it in the format string.
That then leads, though, into whether or not mimencode is spelt mmencode
on your system. Especially since these days the commands more likely to
exist on modern OSes are the generic character set manipulation
commands such as recode(1).
Perhaps it should just list 3 or 4 alternatives to try until one works?
printf '\0%s\0%s' user password | mmencode
printf '\0%s\0%s' user password | recode ascii../Base64
perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print encode_base64("\0user\0password")'
python -c 'import base64; print base64.b64encode("\0user\0password")'
/me grumbles at newer systems that don't include Perl, only Python
-Phil
