Ok this is a stupid questions

[Ángel]

On 2019-02-25 at 14:13 +0000, Michael Holly wrote:
> What I suspect is that instead of erroring out, GPG starts the decrypt
> process over and appends the new output to the previous cycle..   I
> have not tested this, but will soon. 
>
> I just wanted to see if anyone else has seen this happen.
> 
Not that it couldn't happen, but I find strange gpg would do that.
Erroring out would make more sense. Note that GnuPG can work in filter
mode, so you can do
 cat incomplete_file | gpg -d > output_file   (*)

in which case it really can't start over.

I don't think it would process things differently, but worth trying. How
are you invoking gpg? Which version are you running?


(*) Yes, this is an useless use of cat™ In fact, it's quite likely cat
will be faster than whatever is transferring the file, piping eg. 
wget -O - would make more sense.
(**) Remember that even though you are getting an incomplete output,
unless the gpg terminates with no error after verifying the data,
**there's no guarantee about the contents** Don't pipe that output to
bash or otherwise treat as trusted data! Wait to the next command for
that (after verifying that gpg is ok with what was provided).


Cheers

Ángel