GPG Recipients List

[Oertel, Paul]

Dennis,

Thank you for your advice. I read about the differences between options and
commands in the documentation but I didn't see anything to indicate that
some options were not very useful when invoked from the command line.
Perhaps I overlooked that part. If not, the docs should be updated. I could
not find any information on what to do when gpg enters the interactive mode
(i.e. when the "Go ahead and type your message ..." message comes up). Is
this something I overlooked or is it an undocumented feature?

I was able to configure a group in my gpg.conf file but the syntax is
slightly different. 

I had to drop the dashes to look like this

group mylist=Peter Paul Mary

instead of

--group mylist=Peter Paul Mary

I'm assuming that when options are used in the conf file they drop the
dashes.

Thanks for your help.

Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Lambe Jr. [mailto:malsyned at cif.rochester.edu]
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 12:10 AM
To: Oertel, Paul
Cc: 'gnupg-users at gnupg.org'
Subject: Re: GPG Recipients List


On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 03:53, Oertel, Paul wrote:
> I want to make a group of recipients. The manual indicates that I can
> do do this using the --group option but it doesn't give any examples
> or explain how to do it. When I try to follow the manual it looks
> something like this.
>  
> C:\GnuPG>gpg --group "mylist=Paul"
> gpg: Go ahead and type your message ...

GnuPG splits its command-line arguments up into options and commands. 
Any option can also be specified in your config file, ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf,
which will cause it to be in effect for every gpg command you run.  As a
result of this, the documentation lists a lot of command-line switches
that are of little use on the command line, but useful as part of your
config file.  The "group" option is one of these.

If you specify a group on the command line, that group only exists for
the lifetime of the command that you are running (and is therefore nigh
useless).  If you specify a group in the config file, that group will
exist to gpg whenever you run it, allowing you to specify it as a
recipient of encrypted messages (-r groupname).

It looks like you're expecting the --group command-line option to create
a group which persists for longer than the lifetime of the gpg process
you gave it to.  That's not how configuration works in GnuPG.  Any
change that you want to make to the behavior of all subsequent gpg
processes must be made in the config file.

--D