NASTY(1)

📦
version 0.6+git20220929.9830b7a · 2 versions
, in debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 NASTY — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so this is the manual page for nasty, from the User Commands corner of the manual. Pull up a chair, grab a strawberry 🍓, we're doing this.

✨ NAME ✨

nasty — a tool which helps you to recover your GPG passphrase 🫶

Like, that's the whole thing. It finds the passphrase you lost. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

nasty [OPTIONS]

That's it. That's the whole vibe. Just the program and however many options you feel like throwing at it.

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

nasty is a program that helps you to recover the passphrase of your PGP or GPG-key in case you forget or lost it.

Yes bestie, it's a passphrase recovery tool, and no, it does not judge you for forgetting it. It just sits there and tries stuff until something works. Main character energy fr fr. 💅

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • -a x — set minimum length of passphrase. Like, the shortest thing it's allowed to guess. tiny floor, no gatekeeping.
  • -b x — set maximum length. The ceiling. The absolute limit. Nothing longer than this gets attempted. 🎀
  • -m x — set guessing mode, and there are three of them:
    • incremental: try them all. Every single one. It's giving dedication. 😭
    • random: try at random. Chaos mode, lowkey unhinged, we respect it.
    • file: read phrases from file (use -i). the reading-from-a-list girlies — go pair this with -i or it's just vibes with no data.
  • -i x — file to read the passphrases from. Your lil wordlist, your lil stash. 📚
  • -f x — file to write the found passphrase to. So when it finds it you don't lose it again immediately, bestie. 🫶
  • -c x... — charset, and you can pass one or more of these lil guys:
    • a: a-z — lowercase girlies
    • A: A-Z — uppercase, bold, screaming
    • 0: 0-9 — the digits, the numbers, the math
    • .: all ascii values (32...126) — the whole printable spread ✨
    • +: 32...255 (default(!)) — yes, that's the default, and yes, that's a LOT of characters. The (!) is doing heavy lifting there. Not me warning you gently. 🙈
  • -k x — filter string to select a key. When you've got a whole keyring and you only want one specific key, this is how you narrow it down. 🎯
  • -v — enable verbose mode. It'll tell you what it's doing instead of sitting there mysteriously. communicative king. 💜
  • -h — show command options. The "help me bestie I forgot the flags" flag. Very meta. Very necessary.

💀 ISSUES 💀

Nasty will not work if you try it with a gpg-agent running in your system.

And why, you ask? For obvious reasons the agent will ask you the passphrase to access your private key — which you probably don't record, right? :)

So yeah. If gpg-agent is up, this whole plan is cooked. Shut it down first, bestie, iykyk. 😭

🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

This manual page was written by Tiago Bortoletto Vaz <tiago@debian.org> for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). Shoutout to Tiago, absolute legend for writing this down. 🎀

and that's the page, bestie ✨ it's nasty, it lives in the manual as nasty, and this whole thing is dated September 2009 — yes, 2009, we were all babies. mwah 💅💖🦋

📦 where this page comes from