Signing & the "-" character

[Samuel ]slund]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 02:37:28PM +0530, Abhay S. Kushwaha wrote:
> Whenever I sign an email message, any sentence starting with the dash
> character "-" gets an additional "- " prepended. So a sentence that is
>
<<<< Snip >>>>
> 
> 1. Why does this happen?
> 2. Is this intentional or a side effect of something?
> 3. Can this be avoided? If so, how?
> 4. What other characters are similarly prepended?

Clearsigned messages uses dashes to indicate start and end of the signed
message and the signature. This is defined in OpenPGP.
The man-page for GnuPG ("gpg.man" in your GnuPG installation directory)
includes a reference to <http://www.gnupg.org/docs.html> .
Your question is FAQ 6.8.

Man pages are the place where documentation is normaly found on
unix-like systems.

For more information than you prabably want about "dash-escaped" text,
find a copy of RFC 2440 (that defines PGP messages) and search it for "dash".
Googling for "OpenPGP" and "RFC" gives RFC 2440 as the first hit.

HTH
//Samuel

PS. if others are listening:
For someone that does not know unix it is not obvious that gpg.man is
information. A referens to that file in the help text in the windows version
could be helpfull. Put such information last in the helptext, the rest
dissapears of screen...
DS.