Encrypting / decrypting without importing keys?

[Atom 'Smasher']

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On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Eric B. wrote:

> Thanks!  That was just what I needed.  However, have a followup question
> though.  I now need to programatically convert the ascii key to a binary
> key.  Doing a quick export of a key in binary format and in armoured format,
> I noticed that I can base64 encode the binary key and get an almost exact
> match to the armoured format.   However, there seem to be five characters on
> a newline (=oge7) that appear in the armoured key which are not my base64
> conversion of the binary key.   I can only assume them to be some form of a
> CRC check, but am not sure.  Is there armoured version of the key always
> followed by a CRC check?  If so, is it a CRC32 check?  CRC24? etc?  How can
> I tell when/where the key ends and the CRC checks starts?   Does a armoured
> key always end with a specific character?  Is there a doc which specifies
> the format of the armoured key somewhere?
=================

something like this will read an ascii key from the file "key.asc" and 
write a binary key to file "key.binary":
 	gpg --dearmor < key.asc > key.binary

the "--dearmor" isn't very well documented, but among the things it can do 
is convert an ascii key into a binary key.


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