Question

Is there a way to store binary data inside a BASH script so that it can be piped to a program later in that script?

At the moment (on Mac OS X) I’m doing

play sound.m4a
# do stuff

I’d like to be able to do something like:

SOUND <<< the m4a data, encoded somehow?
END
echo $SOUND | play
#do stuff

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Base64 encode it. For example:

$ openssl base64 < sound.m4a

and then in the script:

S=<<SOUND
YOURBASE64GOESHERE
SOUND

echo $S | openssl base64 -d | play