NAME¶
pinentry-curses - PIN or pass-phrase entry dialog for GnuPG
SYNOPSIS¶
pinentry-curses [OPTION...]
DESCRIPTION¶
pinentry-curses is a program that allows for secure entry of PINs or pass
phrases. That means it tries to take care that the entered information is not
swapped to disk or temporarily stored anywhere. This functionality is
particularly useful for entering pass phrases when using encryption software
such as GnuPG or e-mail clients using the same. It uses an open protocol and
is therefore not tied to particular software.
pinentry-curses implements a PIN entry dialog using the curses tool kit,
meaning that it is useful for users working in text mode without the X Window
System. There are other flavors that implement PIN entry dialogs that use an X
tool kit. If you have installed any of the latter programs then this program
is not necessary because the X flavors automatically fall back to text mode if
X is not active.
pinentry-curses is typically used internally by
gpg-agent. Users
don't normally have a reason to call it directly.
OPTIONS¶
- --version
- Print the program version and licensing information.
- --help
- Print a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line
options.
- --debug, -d
- Turn on some debugging. Mostly useful for the maintainers. Note that this
may reveal sensitive information like the entered pass phrase.
- --enhanced, -e
- Ask for timeouts and insurance, too. Note that this is currently not fully
supported.
- --no-global-grab, -g
- Grab the keyboard only when the window is focused. Use this option if you
are debugging software using pinentry-curses; otherwise you may not
be able to to access your X session anymore (unless you have other means
to connect to the machine to kill pinentry-curses).
- --parent-wid N
- Use window ID N as the parent window for positioning the window.
Note, that this is not fully supported by all flavors of
pinentry.
- --display STRING, --ttyname STRING,
--ttytype STRING, --lc-type STRING,
--lc-messages STRING
- These options are used to pass localization information to
pinentry-curses. They are required because pinentry-curses
is usually called by some background process which does not have any
information on the locale and terminal to use. Assuan protocol options are
an alternative way to pass these information.
SEE ALSO¶
pinentry-gtk-2(1),
pinentry-qt4(1),
gpg(1),
gpg-agent(1)
The full documentation for
pinentry-curses is maintained as a Texinfo
manual. If the
pinentry-doc package is installed, the command
- info pinentry
should give you access to the complete manual.
AUTHOR¶
This manual page was written by Peter Eisentraut for the Debian project.