pinentry-curses

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

NAME
       pinentry-curses - PIN or pass-phrase entry dialog for GnuPG

SYNOPSIS
       pinentry-curses [OPTION...]

DESCRIPTION
       pinentry-curses  is  a  program that allows for secure entry of PINs or
       pass phrases.  That means it tries to take care that the entered infor-
       mation  is  not  swapped  to disk or temporarily stored anywhere.  This
       functionality is particularly useful for entering pass phrases when us-
       ing encryption software such as GnuPG or e-mail clients using the same.
       It uses an open protocol and is therefore not tied to particular  soft-
       ware.

       pinentry-curses  implements  a  PIN  entry dialog using the curses tool
       kit, meaning that it is useful for users working in text  mode  without
       the  X Window System.  There are other flavors that implement PIN entry
       dialogs that use an X tool kit.  If you have installed any of the  lat-
       ter  programs  then this program is not necessary because the X flavors
       automatically fall back to text mode if X is not active.

       pinentry-curses is typically used internally by gpg-agent.  Users don't
       normally have a reason to call it directly.

OPTIONS
       --version
              Print the program version and licensing information.

       --help Print  a  usage message summarizing the most useful command-line
              options.

       --debug, -d
              Turn on some debugging.   Mostly  useful  for  the  maintainers.
              Note that this may reveal sensitive information like the entered
              pass phrase.

       --enhanced, -e
              Ask for timeouts and insurance, too.  Note  that  this  is  cur-
              rently not fully supported.

       --no-global-grab, -g
              Grab the keyboard only when the window is focused.  Use this op-
              tion if you are debugging software using pinentry-curses; other-
              wise  you  may  not  be able to to access your X session anymore
              (unless you have other means to connect to the machine  to  kill
              pinentry-curses).

       --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  pinen-
              try.

       --display STRING, --ttyname STRING, --ttytype STRING, --lc-type STRING,
       --lc-messages STRING
              These options are  used  to  pass  localization  information  to
              pinentry-curses.   They  are required because pinentry-curses is
              usually called by some background process which  does  not  have
              any  information on the locale and terminal to use.  Assuan pro-
              tocol options are an alternative way to pass these information.

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, 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.

                                  27 Jan 2005               PINENTRY-CURSES(1)