I can't answer that because I'm not them, but maybe man...? My point is that: - base64 is a stupid easy command to use the default behavior (guessing is easily

I can't answer that because I'm not them, but maybe man...? My point is that: - base64 is a stupid easy command to use the default behavior (guessing is easily possible) - they probably would not have retained flags from the man page unless they needed to use them the first time they used base64 - they probably didn't need to use any flags with base64 in the past - it's perfectly reasonable to expect base64 to base64 long inputs the same way it encodes short ones. In fact I would say any other suggestion is unreasonable - it is perfectly reasonable to not read the man page again when you have a concrete expectation of how a program should behave