Shell – gpg asks for password even with –passphrase

gpgshell-script

I expect the following command to extract the gpg file without asking for password:

  gpg --passphrase 1234 file.gpg

But it asks for the password. Why?

This also have the same behavior:

  gpg --passphrase-file passfile.txt file.gpg

I use Ubuntu with gnome 3, and remember that it was working in Fedora

Best Answer

I am in your exact same boat (it worked on Fedora but not Ubuntu). Here is an apparent work around I discovered:

echo your_password | gpg --batch --yes --passphrase-fd 0 your_file.gpg

Explanation: Passing 0 causes --passphrase-fd to read from STDIN rather than from a file. So, piping the passphrase will get --passphrase-fd to accept your specified password string.

Related Solutions

Decrypt files encrypted with gpg using xargs

Run gpg-agent or a similar program. Set up gpg to look for a running agent, as explained in the documentation. Enter the passphrase in the agent once and for all (for this session).

Note that ls | xargs -n 1 gpg only works if your file names do not contain any special characters. Generally speaking, don't parse the output of ls, and xargs is pointless when you want to run the program once per file. Do this instead:

for x in *.gpg; do gpg "$x"; done

Using GPG key in Gajim without passphrase

You really should use either gpg-agent and/or the similar program provided by Gnome. This way your system will ask for the passphrase only once per boot.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Decrypt files encrypted with gpg using xargs

Using GPG key in Gajim without passphrase

Related Question