xenial (1) qprint.1.gz

NAME

       qprint - encode / decode file as RFC 1521 MIME Quoted-Printable

SYNOPSIS

       qprint -d|-e [ options ] [ infile [ outfile ] ]

DESCRIPTION

       The  MIME  (Multipurpose  Internet  Mail  Extensions)  specification  RFC  1521 and successors) defines a
       mechanism for encoding text consisting primarily of printable ASCII characters,  but  which  may  contain
       characters  (for example, accented letters in the ISO 8859 Latin-1 character set) which cannot be encoded
       as 7-bit ASCII or are non-printable characters which may confuse mail transfer agents.

       qprint 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.  With appropriate options, qprint can encode  pure  binary  files,  but
       it's a poor choice since it may inflate the size of the file by as much as a factor of three.  The Base64
       MIME encoding is a better choice for such data.

OPTIONS

       -b, --binary
                   Treat the input (when encoding) or output (when decoding) file as pure  binary,  and  process
                   end  of  line  sequences  as  binary  data.   Encoding  and  decoding a file with this option
                   preserves the exact sequence of bytes in the input, but does not perform the  translation  of
                   end of line sequences normally performed by Quoted-Printable encoding.

       --copyright Print program copyright information.

       -d, --decode
                   Decodes the input, previously created by qprint, to recover the original input file.

       -e, --encode
                   Encodes the input into an output text file containing its qprint encoding.

       -i, --ebcdic
                   Encode  ASCII  characters  for  which no equivalent exists in the EBCDIC character set.  This
                   renders files more portable when transported to EBCDIC systems.

       -n, --noerrcheck
                   Suppress error checking when decoding.  By default,  upon  encountering  a  non  white  space
                   character  which  does  not  belong  to  the  qprint  set,  or  discovering the input file is
                   incorrectly padded to a multiple of four characters,  qprint  issues  an  error  message  and
                   terminates  processing  with  exit  status 1.  The -n option suppresses even this rudimentary
                   error checking; invalid characters are silently ignored and the output truncated to the  last
                   three valid octets if the input is incorrectly padded.

       -p ,--paranoid
                   Every  character  in  the  input  file  will be encoded as an escape sequence.  You must also
                   specify the -b or --binary option if you wish end of line sequences to be  escaped  as  well.
                   This  option is a last resort when there's no other way to transmit the file, but an encoding
                   explicitly designed for binary data such as Base64 is a much more economical choice.

       -u, --help  Print how-to-call information.

       --version   Print program version information.

EXIT STATUS

       qprint returns status 0 if processing was completed without errors, 1 if an I/O error occurred or  errors
       were  detected in decoding a file which indicate it is incorrect or incomplete, and 2 if processing could
       not be performed at all due, for example, to a nonexistent input file.

FILES

       If no infile is specified or infile is a single ``-'', qprint reads from standard input; if no outfile is
       given,  or  outfile  is  a  single  ``-'',  output  is sent to standard output.  The input and output are
       processed strictly serially; consequently qprint may be used in pipelines.  The program can process files
       of any size supported by the system containing text lines of arbitrary length.

BUGS

       Encoding a file with a large percentage of non-ASCII characters may dramatically increase its size.  This
       is inherent in the design of Quoted-Printable encoding.

       Please report bugs and documentation errors to bugs@fourmilab.ch.

SEE ALSO

       base64(1), uuencode(1), RFC1521

AUTHOR

            John Walker
            http://www.fourmilab.ch/

       This software is in the public domain.  Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and
       its  documentation  for  any  purpose  and  without  fee  is  hereby  granted,  without any conditions or
       restrictions.  This software is provided ``as is'' without express or implied warranty.

       This  is  version  1.1  of  qprint.   The  current  version  of  this  program  may  be  downloaded  from
       http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/qprint.