Reading passphrase from an environment variable.

[David Shaw]

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 03:34:02PM -0800, John Mathew wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Whenever I decrypt or encrypt using GPG it prompts for the passphrase.  I
> would like to set the passphrase in a UNIX environment variable and every
> time GPG should read from this variable. The idea is to run decryption and
> encryption using shell scripts which does not require any prompting.

There are many reasons why this is a bad idea security-wise, the most
notable is that any other user on the box can see your environment,
and hence your passphrase.

However, if these reasons do not apply to your situation:

  echo $passphrase | gpg --passphrase-fd 0 ......

The --passphrase-fd option will read the passphrase from whatever fd
is specified during GnuPG startup.

David

-- 
   David Shaw  |  dshaw at jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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