BASENC(1)

💖 BASENC(1) — bestie edition 💖

okay so this is basenc, section 1 of the manual, and bestie it is exactly the little encoder/decoder you've been looking for. it's giving "swiss army knife but make it base-anything" ✨

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🦋 NAME 🦋

basenc — encode/decode data and print to standard output. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

also!! when you're decoding, the input is allowed to have newlines in it on top of the bytes of the formal alphabet, which is lowkey generous of it. and if there's other non-alphabet junk in that encoded stream and you wanna try to recover? use --ignore-garbage for that. periodt. 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

basenc [OPTION]... [FILE]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

basenc encodes and decodes data and prints it to standard output. no FILE? or FILE is literally just -? then it reads from standard input, easy.

and okay here's the tea on decoding: the input may contain newlines in addition to the bytes of the formal alphabet. but if there's other non-alphabet bytes in the encoded stream, that's when you reach for --ignore-garbage and it will attempt to recover from them. slay. 🫶

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -d, --decode — decode data. the reverse girlie.
• -i, --ignore-garbage — when decoding, just ignore non-alphabetic characters. letting it go, moving on, no drama. 🧚
• -w, --wrap <COLS> — wrap encoded lines after COLS characters. default is 76, and 0 disables wrapping entirely (chaos option, honestly).
• --base64 — same as the base64 program. the classic.
• --base64url — file- and url-safe base64. the one that behaves in URLs. 🌈
• --base32 — same as the base32 program.
• --base32hex — extended hex alphabet base32.
• --base16 — hex encoding.
• --base2lsbf — bit string with least significant bit (lsb) first.
• --base2msbf — bit string with most significant bit (msb) first.
• --z85 — ascii85-like encoding. ⚠️ and listen: when encoding, input length must be a multiple of 4; when decoding, input length must be a multiple of 5. no in-between, no exceptions, no cap.
• --base58 — visually unambiguous base58 encoding. no confusing lookalike characters here, iykyk. 👑
• -h, --help — print help.
• -V, --version — print version.
• [file]

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⭐ VERSION ⭐

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🌸 EXAMPLES 🌸

encode a file with Base64 encoding:

basenc --base64 path/to/file

decode a file with Base64 encoding:

basenc [-d|--decode] --base64 path/to/file

encode from stdin with Base32 encoding with 42 columns:

command | basenc --base32 [-w|--wrap] 42

encode from stdin with Base32 encoding:

command | basenc --base32

the examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. 💜 also please keep in mind that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. not me warning you in advance though 😭

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okay that's the whole page, bestie!! 🎀 this came to you from v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0, dated 2026-09-25 — write that down, take a pic, it's iconic 📸✨ mwah, go encode something 💖