Maybe it would behoove people to read the manual before they "discover a quirk"? I always at least give the manual a good skim before running the command at all...
This surely isn't the first time they've run the base64 command. If they have used it before, I wouldn't expect them to read the manual again unless they are trying to get different behavior out of the tool. Instead they had to read it again to get the same behavior out of the tool
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
