How do I specify the keyserver with GPG?

Question

Tutorials online say to use the option --keyserver, like this:

gpg --send-keys <keyID> --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371'

but gpg doesn't recognise the option --keyserver. What am I doing wrong?

I can't see a difference between these two. BTW gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.12 supports and it's man page is not silent about --keyserver
@Serge the commands has an argument <keyID> that isn't visible because was interpreted as an HTML tag. I suggested an edit to correct this.
@Korgan, You asked a question along with the answer. You may want create a new answer and mark as solved. It's OK.
The right thing will be: gpg --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371' --send-keys <keyid>* - I would not intermix switches and values

Michael Mrozek · Answer 1 · 2012-09-30 01:41:36Z

GPG's command-line parsing is a bit odd:

gpg [--homedir dir] [--options file] [options] command [args]

The correct order is options, then the command, then the command's arguments, so you should do:

gpg --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371' --send-keys <keyID>

It looks like GPG will let you get away with putting the command before the options, so you can also do:

gpg --send-keys --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371' <keyID>

But the command's arguments (in this case, <keyID>) must be last. From the man page:

Please remember that option as well as command parsing stops as soon as a non-option is encountered,

1 Answer