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The MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) specification (RFC 1341
and successors) defines a mechanism for encoding arbitrary binary information
for transmission by electronic mail. Triplets of 8-bit octets are encoded as
groups of four characters, each representing 6 bits of the source 24 bits.
Only characters present in all variants of ASCII and EBCDIC are used, avoiding
incompatibilities in other forms of encoding such as uuencode/uudecode.
base64 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.
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