PKI---DN(1)

💅 PKI --DN 💅

okay bestie, welcome to the pki --dn page from the strongSwan manual (section 1, she's official 💅). This one's short and sweet and honestly kinda iconic for one specific reason, so let's get into it ✨

---

🌸 NAME 🌸

pki --dn — extract the subject DN of an X.509 certificate 🎀

---

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

pki --dn [--in file] [--format format] [--debug level]

pki --dn --options file

pki --dn -h | --help

---

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So this sub-command of pki(1) does one thing and does it well: it pulls out the ASN.1-encoded subject DistinguishedName (DN) from an X.509 certificate and exports it in a few different formats. Periodt 💅

And like… when is that useful? Glad you asked 🫶 It's for when strongSwan's identity parser is lowkey unable to produce the correct binary encoding from a string. That's it, that's the whole vibe check. When the parser can't get the encoding right, --dn comes in and saves the day 👑

---

💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -h, --help — prints usage info plus a lil summary of all the available options. The "wait what does this do again" button 🙈
• -v, --debug level — sets the debug level. Default is 1. Turn it up if you want the tea ☕
• -+, --options file — reads the command line options from file. Yes bestie, that's a literal -+ and no I'm not joking 💀
• -i, --in file — the input file. If you don't give one, the input gets read from STDIN. No file? No problem, pipe it in 🧚
• -t, --format format — the output format, and here's your menu, pick one:
  • config — strongSwan configuration compatible ✨
  • hex — hexadecimal encoding, no prefix 🔥
  • base64 — Base64 encoding, no prefix 🎀
  • bin — raw binary data 💀 (careful, that's raw bytes going straight to your terminal/output)

Defaults to config 👑

---

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

pki(1) — go read the main character's page, she's got the whole story 🌈

---

and that's the whole page, bestie 🌸 signin' off with the deets: this is 6.1.0 of strongSwan, dated 2015-08-06 — yes she's a 2015 girlie and she still ate 💅✨🫶