I am attempting to write a bash script to convert hex to base64

Question

I am attempting to do the matasano cryptopals challenges in bash.

The first step is here

I found this stackexchange thread with a partial solution.

printf 49276d2 | xxd -r -p | base64

which produces SSdt as wanted.

I am looking to make a bash script so I can simply do

hexto64 49276d2 

and get the same result. I'm not sure where to start after the #!/bin/bash . I have not found a similar example which takes arguments and pipes them through other commands and then outputs a result.

Answer 1

In your script file named hexto64, simply write :

#!/bin/bash

printf "%s" "$1" | xxd -r -p | base64

And then you can use it as such :

hexto64 49276d2

Just so you know, $1 means the first parameter you gave after the program name : 49276d2 in our case.