backblaze-b2-samples / encryption Goto Github PK

A command from encrypt.sh additionally encodes the encrypted file with Base64 (the -a flag):

echo $ONE_TIME_PASSWORD | \
	openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -pass stdin \
	-in $FILE_TO_ENCRYPT -out $FILE_TO_ENCRYPT.enc

What's the rationale behind that? Since Backblaze API seems to handle binary files just fine (for instance, the encrypted key does not get encoded), the Base64 encoding seems unnecessary to me. Moreover, it increases the file size by about 33%, which in turn increases the storage and download costs by roughly the same amount.