| 1 | .TH btoa LOCAL |
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| 2 | .SH NAME |
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| 3 | btoa, atob, tarmail, untarmail \- encode/decode binary to printable ASCII |
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| 4 | .SH SYNOPSIS |
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| 5 | .B btoa |
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| 6 | < inbinary |
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| 7 | > outtext |
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| 8 | .PP |
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| 9 | .B atob |
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| 10 | < intext |
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| 11 | > outbinary |
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| 12 | .PP |
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| 13 | .B tarmail |
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| 14 | who subject files ... |
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| 15 | .SH DESCRIPTION |
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| 16 | .I btoa |
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| 17 | is a filter that reads anything from the standard input, and encodes it into |
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| 18 | printable ASCII on the standard output. It also attaches checksum |
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| 19 | information used by the reverse filter "atob" to check integrity. atob gives |
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| 20 | NO output (and exits with an error message) if its input is garbage or the |
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| 21 | checksums do not check. |
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| 22 | .PP |
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| 23 | tarmail ralph here-it-is-ralph foo.c a.out |
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| 24 | .PP |
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| 25 | .I tarmail |
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| 26 | is a shell that tar's up all the given files, pipes them through btoa, and |
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| 27 | mails them to the given person with the given subject phrase. "tarmail" with no |
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| 28 | args will print a short message reminding you what the required args are. |
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| 29 | When the mail is received at the other end, that person should use |
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| 30 | mail to save the |
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| 31 | message in some temporary file name (say "xx"). Then saying "untarmail xx" |
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| 32 | will decode the message and untar it. By using tarmail, binary files and |
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| 33 | entire directory structures can be easily transmitted between machines. |
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| 34 | Naturally, you should understand what tar itself does before you use tarmail. |
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| 35 | .PP |
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| 36 | Other uses: |
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| 37 | .PP |
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| 38 | crypt < secrets | btoa | mail ralph |
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| 39 | .PP |
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| 40 | will mail the encrypted contents of the file "secrets" to ralph. If ralph |
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| 41 | knows the encryption key, he can decode it by saving the mail (say in "xx"), |
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| 42 | and then running: |
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| 43 | .PP |
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| 44 | atob < xx | crypt |
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| 45 | .PP |
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| 46 | (crypt requests the key from the terminal, |
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| 47 | and the "secrets" come out on the terminal). |
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| 48 | .SH FILES |
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| 49 | /usr/local/bin: the programs |
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| 50 | .SH AUTHOR |
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| 51 | Paul Rutter |
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| 52 | .SH FEATURES |
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| 53 | It uses a compact base-85 encoding so that |
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| 54 | 4 bytes are encoded into 5 characters. |
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| 55 | .SH BUGS |
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| 56 | It uses an obscure base-85 "squoz code" scheme |
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| 57 | to encode 4 bytes into 5 characters. |
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