UUDeview

The UUDeview application was designed to be a program that helps you transmit and receive binary files over the Internet, using electronic mail or newsgroups.

The UUDeview package includes both an encoder and a decoder. The decoder automatically detects the type of encoding used, offering MIME's Base64 and BinHex as well as the popular uuencoding and the less frequently used xxencoding methods.

Recently, support for the popular yEnc encoding was also added. The encoder runs the other way around and encodes a binary file for sending it by mail or news.

UUDeview is a particularly powerful decoder. It was designed to fit the needs of news readers. To be precise, it is a smart multi-part multi-file decoder. You simply save a bunch of articles from your email software or your newsreader into a single or into multiple files, and then fire up UUDeview. Normally, it can take the job from there and decode all files within these messages and/or articles.

The UUDeview package also includes UUEnview, a similarly powerful tool for encoding.

Both are built on top of the UUDeview library. If you are developing mail or news software, you can integrate it into your own software to add encoding and decoding facilities.

Here are some key features of "UUDeview":

Upon popular request, I have added some support for the yEnc encoding. Note that the yEnc encoding is incompatible with MIME. Personally, I discourage using yEnc and suggest to use Base64/MIME instead. Thanks to Matthew Mueller for his contribution of code to do CRC checking.

This is one of the most requested features that I never wanted to add. The '-c' option on UUDeview causes all files to be deleted if anything was decoded from them, leaving only files with no encoded (or broken) data. Be careful with this option, as UUDeview does not discriminate whether these files did have any other undecodable data within them. If any output data was written as a result of reading an input file, it goes.

With autorename (-a) on, UUDeview will rename output files if they already exist (so foo.gif would become foo.gif.1). Alternatively, '+a' inserts a unique sequential number before the last dot in the filename, keeping the extension intact (i.e. foo.gif would become foo.1.gif).

With the "more mime" option (-z), UUDeview will not try as desperately as before to find encoded data in MIME messages (which caused some false readings before).