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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 information is not swapped to disk or  temporar‐
       ily  stored  anywhere.   This  functionality is particularly useful for entering pass phrases
       when using encryption software such as GnuPG or e-mail clients using the same.   It  uses  an
       open protocol and is therefore not tied to particular software.

       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
       latter 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 rea‐
       son 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 currently not fully supported.

       --no-global-grab, -g
              Grab  the keyboard only when the window is focused.  Use this option if you are debug‐
              ging software using pinentry-curses; otherwise you may not be able to to access your X
              session  anymore (unless you have other means to connect to the machine to kill pinen‐‐
              try-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 pinentry.

       --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 protocol op‐
              tions 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 pinen‐‐
       try-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)