[pass] Replace base64 in cygwin?

[Stephen Schoun]

On 04/27/2014 02:32 PM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> When we use the clipboard here's what happens:
>
> 1. The contents of the current clipboard is put in a temporary
> variable for being restored 45 seconds later.
> 2. The first line of the desired file, or the newly generated
> password, is copied to the clipboard, with no trailing newline.
>
> Bash makes (1) very hard because it doesn't allow storing variables
> with null characters, and makes it unnecessarily verbose for
> remembering if the output of a command did or did not have a trailing
> newline. For this reason, we instead treat the contents of the current
> clipboard in (1) as generic binary data. As such, we store it
> temporarily in base64 to work around bash's restrictions.
>
Hi Jason,

Thanks for responding.  So if I understand correctly, the current 
"base64" implementation will preserve any newlines when copying and 
restoring the previous contents of the clipboard. However, replacing the 
"base64" or "base64 -d" command with "tr -d '\n' " will remove any 
newlines when restoring the previous contents to the clipboard, so the 
functionality is not exactly the same.

Still, I noticed that a month ago on the mailing list some people 
expressed interest in simplifying the clip() function by just emptying 
the clipboard after 45 seconds.  Doing this would remove the "base64" 
dependency in cygwin/mingw/msys/msysgit.  Do you have any thoughts on this?

P.S. Do you have a preference about top-posting or bottom-posting email 
replies on the listserv?

Thanks,
--Stephen Stephen