gnupg: Invoking GPG-AGENT
2 Invoking GPG-AGENT
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'gpg-agent' is a daemon to manage secret (private) keys independently
from any protocol. It is used as a backend for 'gpg' and 'gpgsm' as
well as for a couple of other utilities.
The agent is automatically started on demand by 'gpg', 'gpgsm',
'gpgconf', or 'gpg-connect-agent'. Thus there is no reason to start it
manually. In case you want to use the included Secure Shell Agent you
may start the agent using:
gpg-connect-agent /bye
If you want to manually terminate the currently-running agent, you can
safely do so with:
gpgconf --kill gpg-agent
You should always add the following lines to your '.bashrc' or whatever
initialization file is used for all shell invocations:
GPG_TTY=$(tty)
export GPG_TTY
It is important that this environment variable always reflects the
output of the 'tty' command. For W32 systems this option is not
required.
Please make sure that a proper pinentry program has been installed
under the default filename (which is system dependent) or use the option
'pinentry-program' to specify the full name of that program. It is
often useful to install a symbolic link from the actual used pinentry
(e.g. '/usr/bin/pinentry-gtk') to the expected one (e.g.
'/usr/bin/pinentry').
⇒Option Index, for an index to 'GPG-AGENT''s commands and
options.
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