UUDECODE(1) General Commands Manual UUDECODE(1)

uudecode — decode a binary file

uudecode [file]

The uudecode utility reads a file or standard input if no file is specified, that includes data created by the uuencode(1) utility. The uudecode utility scans the input file, searching for data compatible with the format specified in uuencode(1) and attempts to create or overwrite the file described by the data. The pathname, file access permission bits and contents for the file to be produced are all contained in that data. The mode bits of the created file will be set from the file access permission bits contained in the data; that is, other attributes of the mode, including the file mode creation mask (see umask(1) ), will not affect the file being produced.

If the pathname of the file to be produced exists, and the user does not have write permission on that file, uudecode will terminate with an error. If the pathname of the file to be produced exists, and the user has write permission on that file, the existing file will be overwritten.

If the input data was produced by uuencode on a system with a different number of bits per byte than on the target system, the results of uudecode are unspecified.

None.

The following operand is supported:

file
The pathname of a file containing the output of uuencode(1) .

See the INPUT FILES section.

The input files must be files containing the output of uuencode(1) .

The following environment variables affect the execution of uudecode :

Provide a default value for the internationalisation variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value from the implementation-dependent default locale will be used. If any of the internationalisation variables contains an invalid setting, the utility will behave as if none of the variables had been defined.
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalisation variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single- as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
Determine the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .

Default.

Not used.

Used only for diagnostic messages.

The output file will be in the same format as the file originally encoded by uuencode(1) .

None.

The following exit values are returned:

Successful completion.
An error occurred.

Default.

The user who is invoking uudecode must have write permission on any file being created.

The output of uuencode is essentially an encoded bit stream that is not cognizant of byte boundaries. It is possible that a 9-bit byte target machine can process input from an 8-bit source, if it is aware of the requirement, but the reverse is unlikely to be satisfying. Of course, the only data that is meaningful for such a transfer between architectures is generally character data.

None.

None.

uuencode(1) .

February 1997 posix.fail