gpg asks for password even with --passphrase

Question

I expect the following command to extract the gpg file without asking for password:

  gpg --passphrase 1234 file.gpg

But it asks for the password. Why?

This also have the same behavior:

  gpg --passphrase-file passfile.txt file.gpg

I use Ubuntu with gnome 3, and remember that it was working in Fedora

Answer 1

Ok, looking that:

$ gpg --version
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.10
Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Home: ~/.gnupg
Algorithmes supportés:
Clé publique: RSA, RSA-E, RSA-S, ELG-E, DSA
Chiffrement: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH, CAMELLIA128, 
             CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256
Hachage: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Non-compressé, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

Trying:

$ newdir=$(mktemp -d)
$ cd $newdir
$ seq 1 10 | gpg -c --passphrase 1234 -o file.gpg -
$ ls -ltr
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 61  6 jan 14:55 file.gpg
$ hd file.gpg 
00000000  8c 0d 04 03 03 02 cf 1a  30 c8 cb 08 e0 91 60 c9  |........0.....`.|
00000010  2c 6f 3b 41 74 8f 42 cb  4e 64 cd be 94 77 c2 20  |,o;At.B.Nd...w. |
00000020  a8 b9 d6 eb df e5 60 d2  a3 99 69 2a 71 a0 38 59  |......`...i*q.8Y|
00000030  34 8b 50 1b 95 6d 87 d5  9b 93 69 fc b9           |4.P..m....i..|

sound good! Well, now:

$ gpg -d --passphrase 1234 file.gpg 
gpg: CAST5 encrypted data
gpg: encrypted with 1 passphrase
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
gpg: WARNING: message was not integrity protected

While no -d parameter is given (same syntaxe as SO's question), decrypted datas from file.gpg will be extracted to a new file.

$ gpg --passphrase 1234 file.gpg
gpg: CAST5 encrypted data
gpg: encrypted with 1 passphrase
gpg: WARNING: message was not integrity protected

$ ls -ltr
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 64  6 jan 15:24 file.gpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 21  6 jan 15:41 file

$ cat file
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

This work well!

$ cd -
$ rm -fR $newdir
$ unset newdir

I could not reproduce the SO's question environment. :-(

Answer 2

It sounds like you're using gpg2. You need to throw in the --batch option as well. (If you're planning to add this to a script, you'll also want to add in --no-tty and probably --yes.)

Answer 3

I am in your exact same boat (it worked on Fedora but not Ubuntu). Here is an apparent work around I discovered:

echo your_password | gpg --passphrase-fd 0 your_file.gpg

Explanation: Passing 0 causes --passphrase-fd to read from STDIN rather than from a file. So, piping the passphrase will get --passphrase-fd to accept your specified password string.

Answer 4

have you tried doing :

gpg --batch --passphrase-fd 0 --decrypt-files *.gpg
gpg --passphrase-fd 0 1234 file.gpg 

Source: Here