CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxshellbase64
andyf
andyf

Reputation: 3350

decode base64: invalid input

Trying to decode base64 file on GNU/Linux, I get "base64: invalid input".

$ base64 test.zip | base64 -d > test2.zip
base64: invalid input
$ ll test*
-rw-r--r-- 1 user grp 152 19 11:41 test.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 user grp  57 19 11:42 test2.zip

I tried dos2unix command, but it did not help.

My base64 version:

$ base64 --version
base64 (GNU coreutils) 5.97
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software.  You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Simon Josefsson.

Upvotes: 71

Views: 122865

Answers (5)

Micah Elliott
Micah Elliott

Reputation: 10274

If you're doing this on a mac, your version of base64 might not have the flexibility to handle ignoring garbage. If you brew install coreutils, you'll have the gbase64 utility and use it as Joe has described.

Upvotes: 4

denixx
denixx

Reputation: 1

For me, I copied the base64-output on Windows from the Linux console to a file, pasted it into a file in Windows (Sublime Text), and saved it. base64 -d complained on it with base64: invalid input. After investigating the input file, I found file had Windows line endings, CRLF, and original base64 data was built in Linux with Unix line endings. So I reopened source-base64-files, changed line endings to Unix format, and saved files, and decoding was successful without any issues.

Upvotes: 0

Tim Milstead
Tim Milstead

Reputation: 41

You can also try using

echo -n

to suppress new lines and padding the input length to a multiple of 4 with one to three equal characters

=

Upvotes: 3

Shawn Lillemo
Shawn Lillemo

Reputation: 109

Or even more simply

base64 -di foo.zip > foo2.zip

Upvotes: 10

Joe
Joe

Reputation: 42666

That version will not decode (by default) lines with separators, yet the encoder does that by default. (Newer versions don't have this problem.)

One solution:

base64 -w 0 foo.zip | base64 -d > foo2.zip

Alternate:

base64 foo.zip | base64 -di > foo2.zip

The -i option stands for (from the man page):

-i, --ignore-garbage
       When decoding, ignore non-alphabet characters.
[...]
Decoding require compliant input by default, use --ignore-garbage to
attempt to recover from non-alphabet characters (such as newlines)

Upvotes: 124

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