trying to export the sender key

[Don Patou]

I've just created my keys from the gnupg tutorial on 
http://technocage.com/~caskey/gnupg/gpg-cmt.html. The problem is that when I 
try to export my sender key with this line:
 "joe@debian:~/keys/recipient$ gpg --homedir  -a --export recipient"

I get a:
 "gpg: keyblock resource `-a/secring.gpg': file open error
gpg: keyblock resource `-a/pubring.gpg': file open error
gpg: WARNING: nothing exported"

any suggestions?

Thanx in advance