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jdev
Asked: 2012-05-05 12:53:55 +0800 CST

Encoding to base32 from the shell

  • 772

I'm looking to encode an input string to base32 encoding directly from the shell. I'm looking to do this in ubuntu, but I imagine flavor doesn't particularly matter here.

Are there any existing linux/unix tools out there to simply do this?

Something along the lines of:

-bash-3.2$ echo -n 'hello' | base32
linux ubuntu unix shell encoding

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Hmm, a quick package search doesn't give anything like a single, standalone utility.

    On the other hand, it shows that there's an appropriate Perl library, and it's easy enough to whip up a quick perl script. Something like:

    $ sudo apt-get install libmime-base32-perl

    And then a script like base32enc.pl:

    #!/usr/bin/perl

use MIME::Base32 qw( RFC );

undef $/;  # in case stdin has newlines
$string = <STDIN>;

$encoded = MIME::Base32::encode($string);

print "$encoded\n";

    So:

    $ echo -n "hello" | ./base32enc.pl
NBSWY3DP

    The fairly sparse CPAN entry is: http://search.cpan.org/~danpeder/MIME-Base32-1.01/Base32.pm

    So, a minor change will let you do decodes, also.

    • 10

  2. It's installed by default in Ubuntu 16.04 as part of coreutils:

    $ which base32
/usr/bin/base32
    • 4

  3. Using Python:

    $ python
Python 2.7.14 (default, Sep 27 2017, 12:15:00) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 9.0.0 (clang-900.0.37)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import base64
>>> base64.b32encode('hello')
'NBSWY3DP'
    • 3

  4. Just an improvement of cjc excellent answer so we can have a base32 utility which works similarly to base64 in the way we can encode and decode: 

    #! /usr/bin/perl

use MIME::Base32;
use strict;

undef $/;

my $string = <STDIN>;
my $changed;

if ( $ARGV[0] eq "-d" ){
        $changed = MIME::Base32::decode($string);
}else{
        $changed = MIME::Base32::encode($string); 
}

if ( $changed =~ /\n$/ ) {
    printf $changed;
}else{
    printf $changed . "\n";
}

    Test: 

    $ base32 < <(echo -n 'abcdef')
MFRGGZDFMY
$ base32 -d < <(echo  'MFRGGZDFMY')
abcdef
    • 2

    1. Install perl-MIME-Base32.noarch:

      yum install perl-MIME-Base32.noarch

    2. Save the script in bas32 filename:

      #!/usr/bin/perl

use MIME::Base32 qw( RFC );

undef $/;  # in case stdin has newlines
$ed=$ARGV[0];
$string=$ARGV[1];
if ($ed eq "-e")
{
$encoded = MIME::Base32::encode($string);
print "$encoded\n";
}
elsif ($ed eq "-d")
{
$decoded = MIME::Base32::decode($string);
print "$decoded\n";
}
else { print " please pass option also\n";
exit;
}

chmod +x base32
cp base32 /usr/bin/
base32 -e string
base32 -d "any encoded value"
    • 0