What regenerates files in ~/.gnupg?

[David Shaw]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 01:27:52PM -0400, Zembower, Kevin wrote:
> What's automatically regenerating the files in my ~/.gnupg/ directory,
> using the Ubuntu 8.04 system:
> kevinz at kevinz-laptop:~$ date;rm .gnupg/*;sleep 10; ls -l .gnupg/*;date
> Mon Jun 23 12:30:38 EDT 2008
> -rw------- 1 kevinz kevinz  0 2008-06-23 12:30 .gnupg/pubring.gpg
> -rw------- 1 kevinz kevinz  0 2008-06-23 12:30 .gnupg/secring.gpg
> -rw------- 1 kevinz kevinz 40 2008-06-23 12:30 .gnupg/trustdb.gpg
> Mon Jun 23 12:30:48 EDT 2008
> kevinz at kevinz-laptop:~$ 
> 
> This really bit me recently, when, as a newbie to gpg, I copied my keys
> from another system to a USB memory stick, then copied them to the
> kevinz-laptop system to learn how to use encryption with Evolution,
> added a new key for private use, uploaded it to keyservers, then tried
> to move the files back to my USB stick. When I saw the files
> regenerated, I thought I had made a mistake with my 'mv' command, so
> without looking at the timestamps or sizes of the file, just repeated
> the 'mv' command, with the result of wiping out the new key I generated.

If you run gpg, and those files don't exist, gpg will create them.  I
can't say what is running gpg so oten on your system, but something is
doing it - possibly evolution.

David