NAME

rot13 - shroud text with simple rot-13 cypher

SYNOPSIS

rot13 [input [output]]

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents the rot13 text filter. If no filenames are specified, rot13 reads from stdin and writes to stdout. If one filename is specified, rot13 reads from that file and writes to stdout. If two filenames are specified, rot13 reads from the first file and writes to the second file. You may use rot13 inside the vi editor just as you would other filters, e.g. fmt.

Rot13 performs Usenet-standard rot-13 encryption. This is done by taking the input letter and shifting it left by 13 characters, so an A becomes an N, a B becomes an O, and so forth. Applying rot13 a second time restores the original text. The encrypted version of the sentence `The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' looks like this:

	Gur dhvpx oebja sbk whzcf bire gur ynml qbt.

Note that rot-13 is obviously not secure encryption. The main purpose of rot13 is to shield sensitive eyes from potentially offensive or disturbing public messages. Most news readers provide a command to decode rot13 messages. For example, the tin news reader uses the command 'd'.

AUTHOR

The original author is Marc Unangst. Various ways of contacting him are:

	mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us
	...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju
	Marc Unangst of 1:2200/129.0@fidonet.org

The 1994 update was done by Thomas McWilliams. See Changelog in the source distribution for details.

COPYING

Distribution permitted under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (or later versions at your preference). Copies of this agreement are available from:

	Free Software Foundation, Inc., 
	675 Mass Ave, 
	Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.