How can a bash script write out a binary file, without using uudecode?

Question

I've got a little puzzler here for the bash scripting experts... I have a bash script that needs to create a small (80 byte) binary file when it runs. The contents of the file need to be contained inside the script itself (i.e. I don't want to just package the file along with the script).

My script currently does it like this:

echo 'begin-base64 644 dummy.wav' > /tmp/dummy.uu
echo 'UklGRkgAAABXQVZFZm10IBAAAAADAAEAAHcBAADcBQAEACAAZmFjdAQAAAAAAAAAUEVBSxAAAAAB' >> /tmp/dummy.uu
echo 'AAAAQDYlTAAAAAAAAAAAZGF0YQAAAAA=' >> /tmp/dummy.uu
echo '====' >> /tmp/dummy.uu
uudecode -o /tmp/dummy.wav /tmp/dummy.uu
rm /tmp/dummy.uu

... after the above runs, I have my file /tmp/dummy.wav. But I just found out that the computer this script is to run on does not have uudecode installed (and I'm not allowed to install it), so I need to find some other way to create this file. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Some installers do something similar to this:

#!/bin/bash
tail -n +4 $0 | tar xvzf -
exit
<tgz file appended here><newline>

Answer 2

#!/bin/bash

# Define usage help
usage () {
    echo -e "USAGE:\n\t$0 <file to create> <dir to tar> <name of script or command to run>\n"
    exit 0
}

# check commandline arguments
if [ "$1" = "-h" ]; then usage; fi
if [ -z $1 ]; then usage; fi
if [ -z $2 ]; then usage; fi
if [ -z $3 ]; then usage; fi

# test for the directory and if it exists, create the bin file using tar
if [ -d "$2" ]; then
    cat >$1<<EOF
#!/bin/sh -e
sed -e '1,/^exit$/d' "\$0" | tar xzf - && "./$2/$3"
exit
EOF
    tar czf - $2 >> $1
else
    echo "$2 does not exist, aborting!"
    exit 1
fi

# make the new file executable and exit
chmod +x $1
exit 0

Answer 3

Just encode the binary data in base64 and do something like this:

#! /bin/bash

cat <<EOF | base64 -d > wherever-it-goes.bin
UtEOtUaZcUCrEJtPJrA34BH8Wdpxb1/DtfMo5syiE/h+moNyApEkg2ZwA2/jTDdfl4WijnNbMzvZ
RrF3i7X353AjmTjLBz1NcOOJJhRPYLJ4WQYONyYj/fAhnXQd+s4SHaNponOWKj1AAzdlJY1VLWaX
P8QBJQcn2FTL4pJ3N04=
EOF

Answer 4

Put an exit at the end of your script, append the file to the end of the script, and use tail -c 80 to get at the contents. This will work as long as you don't need to worry about newline conversion issues.

Answer 5

If the target computer has perl available:

perl -ne 'print unpack("u",$_)' > dummy.wav <<EOD
M4DE&1D@```!7059%9FUT(!`````#``$``'<!``#<!0`$`"``9F%C=`0`````
C````4$5!2Q`````!````0#8E3```````````9&%T80``````
EOD

That's using the non-base64 format you get from just doing uuencode dummy.wav < dummy.wav on your original computer.

Failing that, you can always do this:

echo -ne '\x52\x49\x46\x46\x48\x00\x00\x00'  > dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x57\x41\x56\x45\x66\x6d\x74\x20' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x10\x00\x00\x00\x03\x00\x01\x00' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x00\x77\x01\x00\x00\xdc\x05\x00' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x04\x00\x20\x00\x66\x61\x63\x74' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x04\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x50\x45\x41\x4b\x10\x00\x00\x00' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x01\x00\x00\x00\x40\x36\x25\x4c' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00' >> dummy.wav
echo -ne '\x64\x61\x74\x61\x00\x00\x00\x00' >> dummy.wav

This little bit of bash was generated with:

$ hexdump -e '"echo -ne '\''" 8/1 "x%02x" "'\'' >> dummy.wav\n"' dummy.wav | sed 's;x;\\x;g;1s/>/ /'

Edited to add: As pointed out in a reply here, something like this is also a possibility:

xargs -d'\n' -n1 echo -ne > dummy.wav <<EOD
\x52\x49\x46\x46\x48\x00\x00\x00\x57\x41\x56\x45\x66\x6d\x74\x20
\x10\x00\x00\x00\x03\x00\x01\x00\x00\x77\x01\x00\x00\xdc\x05\x00
\x04\x00\x20\x00\x66\x61\x63\x74\x04\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00
\x50\x45\x41\x4b\x10\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\x40\x36\x25\x4c
\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x64\x61\x74\x61\x00\x00\x00\x00
EOD

(the -d argument is important to turn off xargs's own backslash processing)

You can also turn the 8/1 in my hexdump command into 80/1 and have a single long echo line.

Answer 6

I would use base64 encoding, as that seems to be the general replacement for uu encoding, and operates on very similar principles.

Answer 7

From my point of view uuencode and uudecode are essential, but that's only my opinion. Without creating temporary files you could also do something like this (uudecode.sh):

#!/bin/bash
# --
# -- Uudecoding without using a regular temporary file
# --

# -- Create a named pipe:
mknod /tmp/.dummypipe p

# -- Starting uudecoding on that pipe in the background:
uudecode -o dummy.txt /tmp/.dummypipe &

# -- Push base64-uuencoded content into the named pipe:
cat <<END_DUMMY > /tmp/.dummypipe
begin-base64 644 dummy.txt
VGhpcyBpcyB0aGUgdXVkZWNvZGVkIHRleHQuCg==
====
END_DUMMY

# -- Remove the named pipe
rm /tmp/.dummypipe

Answer 8

This is another example to decode radix 64 formatted data, it runs slow, but it is functional.

#!/bin/bash
exec<$0
while read line ; do if [ "$line" = "#payload" ] ; then break; fi; done
r64='ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/'
i=0; while [ $i -lt 256 ] ; do tab[$i]=-1 ; let i=$i+1 ;done
i=0; while [ $i -lt 64 ] ; do tab[`printf "%d" "'${r64:$i:1}"`]=$i ; let i=$i+1; done
bi=0
while read -n 1 x
do
 in=${tab[`printf "%d" "'$x"`]}
 if [ $in -ge 0 ]; then case $bi in
  0 ) out=$(($in<<2)); bi=6 ;;
  2 ) out=$(($out|$in)); printf \\$(printf '%03o' $(($out&255)) ); bi=0 ;;
  4 ) out=$(($out+($in>>2))); printf \\$(printf '%03o' $(($out&255)) );
  bi=0; out=$(($in<<6)); bi=2 ;;
  * ) out=$(($out+($in>>4))); printf \\$(printf '%03o' $(($out&255)) );
  bi=0; out=$(($in<<4)); bi=4 ;;
  esac fi
done
exit
#payload
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dnZ2dnZ2Cg==