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  3. February 2007

Re: Does someone have function uuencode and uudecode ran on AS/400 ?

Hi Vengoal,

I need the unix tools uuencode and uudecode on AS/400, but IBM tools
5799-PTL GNU does not include these two. Where can I get these tools or
source ?
Frankly, I would think long and hard before using uuencode or uudecode in an i5/OS application. There are very good reasons why the IETF didn't use these techniques when they created the MIME standards for e-mail.
One particular consideration that's very important: uuencode does not stick to invariant characters! That means that translating the data from ASCII to EBCDIC can cause the byte values to change. And since uudecode doesn't have a way to detect that something was changed, it'll simply write a corrupted object when it decodes it, and produce no errors. It's not just ASCII/EBCDIC either, converting between any different character sets (for example, when sending data between people in different countries or cultures) can cause the same sort of corruption.
Base64 was introduced to solve all of these problems. It works VERY similarly to uuencode/uudecode, but fixes all of the problems with uuencode and uudecode. There's no disadvantage to using base64 instead of uuencode/decode.
That's why all of the Internet standards that require this type of technology all specify base64. It's just a better tool.

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