PINENTRY-CURSES(1)

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version 1.3.3 · 2 versions
  • 1.3.3 · debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking (latest)
  • 1.1.1 · ubuntu jammy
, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 PINENTRY-CURSES(1) — like, the manual page, but make it make sense 💖

okay so real talk: this page is filed under pinentry-curses(1) in the General Commands Manual, but the whole thing is actually about pinentry-tty. iconic of them. anyway bestie, let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

pinentry-tty — a PIN or pass-phrase entry dialog for GnuPG 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pinentry-tty [OPTION...]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So pinentry-tty is a lil program that lets you type in PINs or pass phrases securely. Like, it genuinely tries to make sure the stuff you typed does not get swapped to disk and does not get temporarily stored anywhere. no cap. That's the whole vibe.

And why do you care? Because this is lowkey essential when you're entering pass phrases for encryption software like GnuPG, or for email clients that use the same thing. It runs on an open protocol, so it's not tied down to any particular software — it's free to be its own main character 💅.

Here's the tea: pinentry-tty implements the PIN entry prompt directly on the controlling tty. It has minimal dependencies and a comparably minimal feature set. Which makes it genuinely great for people working with dumb terminals and other similarly constrained environments 🌈.

But bestie, listen — there are other pinentry flavors that do more user-friendly PIN entry dialogs, either in text mode with the curses toolkit, or using graphical X11 toolkits. Please use one of those other flavors unless you know what you are doing. fr fr 🙈

Also pinentry-tty is typically used internally by gpg-agent. Regular users don't normally have any reason to call it directly. it's giving backstage pass only 🎟️

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • --version — prints the program version and the licensing info ✨
  • --help — prints a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line options 🫶
  • --debug, -d — turns on some debugging. Mostly useful for the maintainers ngl. ⚠️ Careful though: this may reveal sensitive information like the entered pass phrase. so like, don't do this casually 💀
  • --enhanced, -e — asks for timeouts and insurance, too. heads up: this is currently not fully supported 🙈
  • --no-global-grab, -g — grabs the keyboard only when the window is focused. Use this if you're debugging software that uses pinentry-tty; otherwise you may not be able to access your X session anymore (unless you have other means to connect to the machine to kill pinentry-tty). not me warning you before you lock yourself out 😭
  • --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 — one of the localization-info options, passing localization information to pinentry-tty 🌸
  • --ttyname STRING — same deal, another localization-info option passed to pinentry-tty 🌸
  • --ttytype STRING — yep, another one of those localization-info options 🌸
  • --lc-ctype STRING — still in the localization-info gang 🌸
  • --lc-messages STRING — last of the localization-info squad 🌸

okay so about that whole --display STRING, --ttyname STRING, --ttytype STRING, --lc-ctype STRING, --lc-messages STRING group — these options are how you pass localization information to pinentry-tty. They're required because pinentry-tty is usually called by some background process that has zero information about the locale and terminal to use. And psst — Assuan protocol options are an alternative way to pass this information. two ways to do the same thing, we love options 💅

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

The full documentation for pinentry-tty is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the pinentry-doc package is installed, this command

info pinentry

should give you access to the complete manual. go read it, it's giving ✨scholar✨

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manual page was written by Daniel Kahn Gillmor for the Debian project, derived from other pinentry manual pages written by Peter Eisentraut. we stan both of them 🫶

and that's the whole page bestie!! source: the General Commands Manual, dated 19 Apr 2015 🎀 the PINENTRY-CURSES(1) page, no matter what the title says. slay, stay secure, and don't --debug your pass phrase into existence 💖✨🦋🌸💅🔥👑🌈⭐💜

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