&gt; This only makes sense if your metric is number of code points.<p>Not quite! :) I wrote a similar tool I called baseunicode[1]. (Glad I&#x27;m not the only one who&#x27;s discovered this!) The author here is using it for tweets (which oddly don&#x27;t count bytes, they count code points); I wrote my version for copy&#x2F;pasting data between terminals[2]: copying more than a screen&#x27;s worth is a hassle, so &quot;screen area&quot; is the metric I&#x27;m trying to optimize, which ends up being subtly different from the article&#x27;s, which is code points for a tweet. (for screen area in a terminal, some characters — CJK in particular — end up taking multiple columns; and combining code points (like acute accent) are basically free!)<p>In my case, it ended up being easier to use base64, because it&#x27;s installed by default.<p>[2]: SCP is just a pain sometimes. If you need to read a file only privileged by root, AFAIK, it&#x27;s out of luck. I&#x27;m usually going server-to-server, so I also need to remember to -3, which I inevitably forget. You can get around the root issue w&#x2F; `ssh source &#x27;sudo cat &#x2F;foo&#x2F;bar&#x27; | ssh destination &#x27;cat &gt;foo&#x27;, (or &#x27;sudo bash -c &quot;cat &gt;foo&quot; if you need root on the write…) but more work; often I find I&#x27;m already there in both terminals and I just want these bytes from this split in this other split, so I started doing `tar -cz &lt;stuff&gt; | base64`, copy, `base64 -d | tar -xz`, paste. And then screen size mattered, thus baseunicode.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thanatos&#x2F;baseunicode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thanatos&#x2F;baseunicode</a>