SYNOPSIS
[-q ] [-b | m | p prompt ] [-E | e errortext ][-N NoText ] [-t desctext ] [-Y YesText ]
DESCRIPTION
The utility is a shell wrapper speaking to pinentry using the Assuan protocol. It will ask the user for a passphrase and print it, without any trailing newline, to standard output. There are options for asking a boolean question or displaying a message.If PINENTRY is not empty but points to a non-existing or failing programme, pinentry is not called. Instead, xmessage(1) is used for boolean queries and messages if DISPLAY is set; otherwise, uses simple terminal I/O on GPG_TTY using stty(1) to disable echo of terminal input for passphrase queries.
The options are as follows:
- -b
- Ask for a confirmation (boolean) instead of a passphrase.
- -E
- Unset a previously set error text.
- -E errtxt
- Set the error text to errtxt displaying a dialogue box with a red X icon indicating that this is a retry question.
- -m
- Display a message (one-button query) instead of asking.
- -N NoText
- Use NoText instead of Cancel for the text of the abort button, if any.
- -p prompt
- Set the small descriptive text shown in front of the input field (``the Prompt'' ) to prompt
- -q
- Be more quiet.
- -t desctxt
- Set the descriptive text (the input challenge) to desctxt
- -Y YesText
- Use YesText instead of OK for the text of the confirm button.
All input and output is assumed to be in UTF-8.
RETURN VALUES
The utility exits 0 on success, 1 if the passphrase input was cancelled by the user, or >1 if an error occurred. Confirmation (boolean) error codes are 0 for Yes, 1 for No, or >1 if an error occurred. Messages return >0 if an error occurred, 0 otherwise.A summary of the error codes follows:
- 0
- Read password successfully. Boolean question returned Yes/OK.
- 1
- Boolean question returned No/Cancel.
- 2
- Wrong command line syntax.
- 3
- The process reading user input unexpectedly terminated or errored out.
- 4
- Unexpected result reading from pinentry.
- 5
- Unable to determine controlling tty, caller must set GPG_TTY
- 6
- Caught SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGTRAP, SIGPIPE, or SIGTERM.
ENVIRONMENT
- DISPLAY
- If not set, pass current terminal information to pinentry
- GPG_TERM
- Terminal type of the current tty. Defaults to the value of the environment variable TERM or ``vt100'' if unset.
- GPG_TTY
- The current terminal, determined by tty(1) if unset.
- LC_CTYPE
- Passed to pinentry Default: ``en_US.UTF-8''
- LC_MESSAGES
- Passed to pinentry Unset by default.
- PINENTRY
- The pinentry programme to use. Default: ``pinentry''
AUTHORS
was written by An Thorsten Glaser Aq [email protected] mostly for tarent GmbH.CAVEATS
Some newer pinentry features, such as three-button operation or setting the window title, are not supported yet.BUGS
Some pinentry programmes may not support messages correctly and display them as boolean queries instead.Some implementations display labels with the wrong charset.
Neither of these two problems is an issue in but a bug of the backend implementation.