PINENTRY-CURSES(1)

📦 version 1.3.1, in ubuntu questing

🎀 PINENTRY-CURSES(1) 🎀 — General Commands Manual

✨ NAME ✨

okay so pinentry-curses is the bestie who handles PIN or pass-phrase entry dialogs for GnuPG 💖 🔐

💅 SYNOPSIS ✨

pinentry-curses [OPTION...]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so pinentry-curses is literally a program for secure entry of PINs or pass phrases 🫶 the whole point is that it tries really hard to make sure the info you type doesn't get swapped to disk or stashed anywhere temporarily 🙈 this is SO useful when you're entering pass phrases for encryption software like GnuPG or e-mail clients that use the same thing 🔥 it speaks an open protocol, so it's not married to any one particular software 💜

pinentry-curses shows a PIN entry dialog using the curses tool kit 🦋 which means it's perfect for people working in text mode without the X Window System. ngl this is giving main character energy for terminal lovers 🍓 there are other flavors that do PIN entry dialogs with an X tool kit too, and if you've got any of those installed then you honestly don't need this one, because the X flavors automatically fall back to text mode when X isn't active ✨

pinentry-curses is typically used internally by gpg-agent 🧚 users don't normally have a reason to call it directly, so don't stress 💀

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • --version — prints the program version and licensing info 📜
  • --help — prints a usage message that sums up the most useful command-line options 💁‍♀️
  • --debug, -d — turns on some debugging 🐛 mostly for the maintainers, so don't go poking around unless you're one of them 🙈 > heads up: this may reveal sensitive info like the entered pass phrase 😭
  • --enhanced, -e — asks for timeouts and insurance too 💅 note that this is currently not fully supported, so it's a little bit of a vibe check 🫠
  • --no-global-grab, -g — grabs the keyboard only when the window is focused 🎯 use this if you're debugging software that uses pinentry-curses, because otherwise you might lose access to your X session completely 😱 (unless you have some other way to connect to the machine to kill pinentry-curses, which, iykyk)
  • --parent-wid N — uses window ID N as the parent window for positioning the window 🪟 note that this isn't fully supported by all flavors of pinentry, so no cap, it varies
  • --display STRING, --ttyname STRING, --ttytype STRING, --lc-ctype STRING, --lc-messages STRING — these pass localization info to pinentry-curses 🌈 they're needed because pinentry-curses is usually called by some background process that has zero info about the locale and terminal to use 🥺 Assuan protocol options are an alternative way to pass this info along too 💜

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

pinentry-gtk-2(1), pinentry-qt(1), pinentry-fltk(1), pinentry-gnome3(1), pinentry-tty(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, running 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 🫶

bestie, that's the whole thing 💖 this page came from the Debian project, dated 27 Jan 2005, and it's PINENTRY-CURSES(1) from the General Commands Manual 🌸 slay forever ✨💅

📦 where this page comes from