On Jan 15, 2011, at 11:13 AM, Bo Berglund wrote: > I am building an application for GPG encryption, which ultimately will > be integrated into the Win7X64 Explorer context menu. > I have used the command line command "gpg2 -k" to retrieve a ley list > for the current key ring. Works fine. Now it is time for parsing and I > have a few questions: > > The output from the command looks like this (shortened): > C:/Documents and Settings/Bosse/Application Data/gnupg/pubring.gpg > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > pub 1024D/C50DAFF8 2006-08-19 > uid Bo Berglund <bo.bergl...@gmail.com> > sub 2048g/011AD792 2006-08-19 > > pub 1024D/41C6E930 2003-04-10 > uid Richard Jones <rich...@commonground.com.au> > uid Richard Jones <rich...@mechanicalcat.net> > uid Richard Jones <richardjo...@optushome.com.au> > sub 1024g/40AD97DF 2003-04-10 > > Now, I understand most of this but I would like to know the > significance of these items: > > 1) In the pub line the first item is a number + a letter. I assume > that the number is the bit length of the key, but what does the letter > mean? And which are the possible letters?
Yes, the number is the bit length of the key. The letters are: RSA == R DSA == D Elgamal == g (only seen in subkeys) Historically there was a "G" for an Elgamal key that could both encrypt and sign, but that was dropped from OpenPGP. The current lowercase "g" Elgamal is an encrypt-only key. > 2) What does the last line of each key mean, which starts with sub? > Notice that there is a different hex code and different letter > following the key length... Sub is for subkeys. They are other keys that go along with the main, or primary, key. A common usage pattern is for the primary to be used for signing, and the subkey used to encryption. > 3) Some keys have several uid lines, is there a maximum or minimum > number here? It looks like a number of email addresses attached to the > key, is this correct? There is a minimum of 1. There is no maximum. There are also "uat" lines, of which there are zero or more. A uat is used to store other things aside from text (for example, photo IDs). > 4) I only have one public keyring, but I assume that it is possible to > have several? If so will the -k command list these after each other? > The first output line seems to be the actual keyring location. It is possible to have several. I note that you are trying to parse the output, though. That is a bad idea, as the format is intended for human consumption, and not machine parsing. The machine format is stable, and the human format is subject to change. Use the --with-colons option to enable machine parsing. David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users