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What is working

My gpg-agent pinentry works fine under X. I can run

echo "test" | gpg2 -ase --default-recipient-self | gpg2

to cache my passwords and later run killall gpg-agent -1 to flush them.

By default, it opens pinentry-gtk (from the looks of it) and prompts me for my password.

What is not working

However, if I try to run the same command without an X server, the it appears that gpg2 is hanging (no prompt or anything). If I kill it, then I can see that there is also a pinentry process which continues to exist but not anywhere useful.

What I expect to happen

I expect that running gpg2 without an X server would give me a pinentry-curses prompt, the same way that pass does. Additionally, I seem to remember that with older version of gpg, it just prompted me for my password from stdin, and I'm not quite sure why that doesn't happen either.

What I have tried

I have tried the following "fixes" but none have caused the aforementioned command to execute properly. In fact, forcing pinentry-curses causes the aforementioned command to fail even with the X environment (pass still works).

  • Setting pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses in `gpg-agent.conf``

  • Starting gpg-agent like this: gpg-agent --daemon --keep-tty --use-standard-socket --pinentry-program=/usr/bin/pinentry-curses

  • using an environment variable: export PINENTRY_USER_DATA="USE_CURSES=1”

Background info

I have a nearly empty .gpg-agent config file; all it has is cache timeouts.

I am calling gpg-agent directly upon login like eval $(gpg-agent --daemon). I am not booting into X so I use getty to log in.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

Oops... the answer was in the first screen's worth of man gpg-agent. I needed to add the following lines to my ~/.bashrc:

GPG_TTY=$(tty)
export GPG_TTY

The incorrect value of GPG_TTY explains why pinentry-curses was running, but not where I needed it to.

note: Since the output of tty changes between the console login and after I start my X server, this needs to be run on every ~/.bashrc (whereas most of my export'd environment variables are configured to only run on login).

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0

If you are switching between X and tty often you may want to run 

gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye > /dev/null

To set it to the current environment

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