Add Generate Base64 Encoding Without Newlines as a Unix TIL

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
+```