Comments on: Howto do Base64 Decoding on OSX

By: Jeena Paradies

Jeena Paradies — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 17:58:14 +0000

Or you coud just use http://github.com/jeena/Base64Decoder

By: robert

robert — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:38:28 +0000

Hey Lucas,

Thanks for the response, and slightly more coherant explanation of the behaviour.

-R

By: Lucas

Lucas — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:27:26 +0000

Hi Rob, running 10.5.2 here.
I also got the abort trap error, and simply encoded a file to see “what openssl was looking for” as you say. In fact, it wants pure Base64 with no header or footer info. I stripped all the content marker stuff from the top and bottom of the (text) file and it worked perfectly. Obviously openssl isn’t coded to actually look for or create anything by default except the encoding.

Really glad I don’t have to do this often, because there’s *absolutely* no good OSX app for it. In the PC world, WinZip works like a charm. Ah well, that’s what Parallels is for!
-L

By: robert

robert — Mon, 28 May 2007 04:18:31 +0000

Chuck — the error (not at all friendly I agree) is probably caused by the input file not quite being exactly what openssl was looking for.

The base64 encoded information starts after the content-transfer encod and other content lines (including a blank line).

It goes until there is an end of content type marker (something like –=-+6CkMdvZE6LkzVsMp5qp– ).

By: Chuck Kahn

Chuck Kahn — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:32:24 +0000

This:

openssl base64 -d -in noname

Results in this:

unknown option ‘noname’

This:

openssl base64 -d -in noname

Results in this:

encode.c(262): OpenSSL internal error, assertion failed: n enc_data
Abort trap

I’ll just ask the sender to re-send an archive (zip).

By: Franck Rasolo

Franck Rasolo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Rob

Congratulations are in order for the arrival of Isaac and for switching to OS X too!

Thanks for sharing the tip

Cheers,
Franck