Help me on CommandLine Key Deletion in GPG 1.0.7

[Enzo Michelangeli]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Werner Koch" <wk at gnupg.org>
To: <gnupg-devel at gnupg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: Help me on CommandLine Key Deletion in GPG 1.0.7


> On Tue, 23 Jul 2002 13:40:12 +0530 (IST), Thanga Prakash S said:
[...]
> Deleting a secret key in batch mode is deliberately inhibited.  I am
> note sure why I did it this way.

Perhaps to avoid ruinous bulk deletion of secret keys by mistake (e.g.,
"gpg --batch --delete-secret-and-public-keys e" would delete any keypair
containing an "e".

Actually, I never liked substring matching much: I would prefer exact
matching (the one triggered by the leading "=") to be the default behaviour,
and substring matching to be activated only explicitly by the leading "*"
character; however, I understand that there are backward compatibility
issues. Nevertheless, at least for batch mode, I would recommend to use
exact matching as the default.

Enzo