Add Generate Base64 Encoding Without Newlines as a Unix TIL

Author: jbranchaud

README.md

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ pairing with smart people at Hashrocket.
 
 For a steady stream of TILs, [sign up for my newsletter](https://crafty-builder-6996.ck.page/e169c61186).
 
-_1426 TILs and counting..._
+_1427 TILs and counting..._
 
 ---
 
@@ -1376,6 +1376,7 @@ _1426 TILs and counting..._
 - [Fix Unlinked Node Binaries With asdf](unix/fix-unlinked-node-binaries-with-asdf.md)
 - [Forward Multiple Ports Over SSH](unix/forward-multiple-ports-over-ssh.md)
 - [Generate A SAML Key And Certificate Pair](unix/generate-a-saml-key-and-certificate-pair.md)
+- [Generate Base64 Encoding Without Newlines](unix/generate-base64-encoding-without-newlines.md)
 - [Generate Random 20-Character Hex String](unix/generate-random-20-character-hex-string.md)
 - [Get A List Of Locales On Your System](unix/get-a-list-of-locales-on-your-system.md)
 - [Get Matching Filenames As Output From Grep](unix/get-matching-filenames-as-output-from-grep.md)

unix/generate-base64-encoding-without-newlines.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+# Generate Base64 Encoding Without Newlines
+
+There are a variety of tools that can generate a Base64 encoding of given text.
+Most of them that I've encountered have a number of characters at which they
+introduce a newline character. Here is `openssl` as an example:
+
+```bash
+❯ echo "here is a long bit of text to base64 encode with openssl" | openssl base64
+aGVyZSBpcyBhIGxvbmcgYml0IG9mIHRleHQgdG8gYmFzZTY0IGVuY29kZSB3aXRo
+IG9wZW5zc2wK
+```
+
+[The theory I've seen](https://superuser.com/a/1225139) is that this is to
+accommodate 80-character terminal screens when chunks of encoding were included
+in emails.
+
+With the `openssl base64` command, there is not an option to exclude the
+newlines, but we can pipe it through `tr` to remove them.
+
+```bash
+❯ echo "here is a long bit of text to base64 encode with openssl" | \
+  openssl base64 | \
+  tr -d '\n'
+aGVyZSBpcyBhIGxvbmcgYml0IG9mIHRleHQgdG8gYmFzZTY0IGVuY29kZSB3aXRoIG9wZW5zc2wK
+```