Deleting signatures question.

Stewart V. Wright svwright+lists@amtp.liv.ac.uk
Thu Aug 14 15:33:02 2003


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Hi All,

I have a question about deleting signatures on public keys...

The WoT means that keys in my pubring.gpg are signed by various
people.  Most of the time I do not have the additional keys to go with
these signatures.

What I want to do is delete the signatures on keys in my pubring.gpg
that I don't have the corresponding public keys for, and leave the
ones that I do have the pubkeys.


I will use an example to explain myself.

I expect that like most people on this list I have (at least one of)
Werner's public keys.  As I use mutt I also have Thomas Roessler's
key.  Thomas has signed Werner's key.  However there is a signature on
Werner's key from (chosen randomly) Robert Joop who I've never come
across, so I've never downloaded his key (I had to look him up on
subkeys.pgp.net for this example)...

What I would like to do is _automatically_ be able to delete the
unknown, "[User id not found]" signatures.



I suspect that short of doing it by hand (and the thought of 600+
signatures in some cases) there is no way directly to do this in
GnuPG.  Is that right?

I don't mind writing a script to do it, but can I delete the signature
of keyId XXX from pubkey YYY from the command line?  Or will I have to
use the '--edit-key' functionality and lose the batch advantage?



Points:
 * I know that the next time I refresh my pubring I will get all the
   unwanted signatures back, but if the process is automatic I can
   just re-run the cleaning.
 * This issue does not really have any relevance apart from the space
   that I will save by not having the unnecessary signatures on my
   "quota"ed account.




Thanks,

S.

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