GPG question

[Aaron Gaudio]

On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 19:40 -0400, Terry Polzin wrote:
> On Tuesday August 24 2004 19:36, John Lagrue wrote:
> > I fairly sure that the answer to this question is a resounding "forget
> > it", but want to try anyway.
> >
> > I have a file that I encrypted some time ago on an FC1 system; it was
> > encrypted under KDE and generated a foobar.bz2.gpg file. I know the
> > passphrase that was used to encrypt the file; is there any method by
> > which I can now retrieve the file contents? The KDE installation has
> > passed into history some time ago and cannot be retrieved.
> >
> > JDL
> 
> What you need is you gpg keyring usually found in ~/.gnupg.  Hopefully you 
> have that backed up. 
> 

If you encrypted the file using a symmetric cypher, then I don't think
you need the keyring you were using at the time.

Try gpg -d foobar.bz2.gpg > foobar.bz2

*If the file was encrypted using a symmetric cypher*, it will ask for
the passphrase. Enter it in and you should be golden.

Otherwise, yes you'll need a keyring with the private key from the
keypair you used to encrypt the file.