Cannot import private key

Scott Armitage mail at scott.armitage.name
Wed Apr 18 23:13:27 CEST 2012


Hi everyone,

I am trying to integrate GnuPG with my workflow, and am in the stage of
setting up a new keypair for use across all of my computers. I have created
the key pair, given the private key a passphrase, and generated a
revocation certificate for that key. I am now trying to import that private
key on another computer, but I am having some issues.

I first export the private key using:

gpg --export-secret-key -a <key_id> > private.asc

This seems to work fine, and generates an ASCII-armored key file of the form

-----BEGIN PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32)
[snip]
-----END PGP PRIVATE KEY BLOCK-----

I then take this private key file to a new computer and try to import it
using

gpg --import private.asc
gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
gpg: Total number processed: 0

Any suggestions? This process works fine for exporting and importing public
keys, it's only the private one that is throwing this error. I have also
tried the --allow-secret-key-import, though I understand this is
effectively redundant now.

Regards,
-Scott
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