11 lines
701 B
Text
11 lines
701 B
Text
The MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification (RFC 1341
|
|
and successors) defines a mechanism for encoding arbitrary binary information
|
|
for transmission by electronic mail. Triplets of 8-bit octets are encoded as
|
|
groups of four characters, each representing 6 bits of the source 24 bits.
|
|
Only characters present in all variants of ASCII and EBCDIC are used, avoiding
|
|
incompatibilities in other forms of encoding such as uuencode/uudecode.
|
|
|
|
base64 is a command line utility which encodes and decodes files in this
|
|
format. It can be used within a pipeline as an encoding or decoding filter,
|
|
and is most commonly used in this manner as part of an automated mail
|
|
processing system.
|