Encoding Files with uuencode
You’ll use encoding whenever you’re sending a binary file (a nontext file) through email or posting one to a newsgroup. Although many email programs and news readers will take care of encoding for you (and, therefore, you won’t need to mess with the information here), you may occasionally need to do it yourself.
Files must be encoded so that they can pass through Internet email and news gateways unscathed. If you don’t encode a file and your program doesn’t do it for you, the file will arrive as a bunch of unusable gibberish (because the gateways assume that all text passing through uses 7-bit words (bytes), while binary files use 8-bit words, thus binary files are garbled). To prevent gibberish, just uuencode your ...
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