Matthew Woehlke wrote:
(Sorry this isn't exactly the right list, but this feels like a problem
coreutils should solve, and I don't see gmane carrying anything better.)
I am looking for a way to convert binary data to a format that 'printf'
will understand (and more importantly, from which '<something> | sed
's/\\/\\\\/g' | xargs printf' will produce the same output as the
input). Am I missing such a utility, or might this be an opportunity for
me to write 'unprintf' for coreutils? ('od -An -c' gets close, but still
needs some complex parsing if it is to round-trip.)
The objective is to be able to reproduce a binary file from an 'editor
friendly' shell script. I know base64 could do this, except that base64
is not portable (even to pre-6.x GNU coreutils), whereas printf is IIRC
required by POSIX.
Thanks Eric and Bob for the replies. Unfortunately, as stated, the
problem is that I am looking to generate an editor-friendly script (i.e.
makeself is out) that can be run on arbitrary platforms (i.e. codegroup
is out). And apparently uudecode is also out; my computer has man pages
for it but no programs(?!). Conversely, I can't say I've run into a
system yet that lacks printf.
So my original question remains... would anyone be interested in
considering 'unprintf' for inclusion in coreutils? (Note: I /am/
volunteering to write and maintain it.)
--
Matthew
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