When you attach a file to an e-mail message, such as a simple ASCII text file, the attached file is usually transferred with no problem. However, if you attach a binary file, such as an image (that cute cartoon you want to share), a word processing file (your semester project), or a program (any file that ends with .exe), some systems may corrupt the file as it is being transferred. To prevent this, some people will use a program called uuencode to convert the file to a format that can be transferred without corruption. If you receive an attachment on e-mail that you can't open in its application, such as Word or Excel, then you may have a uuencoded file.
First, you'll have to save the file attached to the e-mail. If you're not familiar with this process, refer to the documentation for the E-Mail Attachments Workshop. If you haven't had any problems opening files from the sender in the past, you probably don't have to go any further. However, if you download the file using FTP or Fetch, and then you can't open it (e.g. Excel won't open a file that should be a worksheet), then it may be uuencoded.
In order to find out for sure if the file has been uuencoded, you'll have to look inside the file. Use something like notepad, simpletext, or some other text editing program to open the file. If the first line starts with begin 640 and is followed by a file name, such as year9798.xls, then this is a uuencoded file (the begin 640 is your clue). If this is the case, you'll have to go back to your Unix account and use uudecode.
If you remember the name you have the file when you saved it from the e-mail message, check to see if the file name is the same as the file name that comes after the "begin 640" in the first line. If it is, you need to rename the file or save it again from the e-mail with a different name. You could use something simple, such as temp1 or test1. The idea is just to have the uuencoded file saved with a name that is different from the internal file name (in the example above, year9798,xls).
Once you've saved the attachment, exit Pine, but don't exit your Unix account. From the UNIX prompt, the $ sign:
You won't get any indication that the process worked. So, to verify that the file was decoded, type ll (2 lower case L's) and hit enter on your keyboard. This executes the long list command and will list the files in your UNIX directory. Look for a file with the same name that was included in the first line of the uuencoded file. In the example above, that would be year9798.xls.
Now that the file has been converted, you can use FTP or Fetch to transfer the converted file to your computer.