News for PGP 2.2
The main change since PGP 2.1 is a speedup in key management, and
the ability to encrypt for more than one recipient. Apart from
this there are some bugfixes and some new options to make it easier
to use PGP from shell scripts or mailers.
You can encrypt for more than one recipient by specifying additional
userids on the command line eg:
pgp -e plaintext Alice Bob Carol
Some notes about the changes:- PGP doesn't do a keycheck on a keyfile
before it is added anymore,
this is to speed up merging a big keyfile with your public keyring which
may already have most of the keys in the keyfile you are adding. After
PGP has checked a signature it sets a flag in your public keyring to
mark this signature as checked. Because PGP 2.1 didn't have these
flags, PGP will check *all* signatures on your keyring the first time
you add a key with PGP 2.2. After that PGP will only check new
signatures. Also by using an older version than 2.2 on your keyring you
will clear these flags again.
New options:
+interactive
If you add a keyfile, PGP will ask for each new key if it should
be added to your keyring.
Options for use in shell scripts:
+verbose=n
The default is 1. With +verbose=0, PGP will only print an error
message if something goes wrong. With +verbose=2, PGP will tell
you what it's doing in detail suitable for debugging.
+force
Overwrite output file without asking, or with -kr: remove key
without asking (only if it has just one userid).
+batchmode
With this option PGP won't ask any questions or prompt for
alternate file names. Some of the key commands still need
user interaction and can't be done from a shell script.
You can also use this option to check if a file has a good
signature. If the input file did not have a signature the exit
code will be 1, if the file had a signature and if it checked OK
the exit code will be 0. Note that if the input file has more
than one armored messages, a good signature on one of these
messages will make the exit code 0 (if there are no errors).
These "long" options can be abbreviated as long as the abbreviation is
unambiguous. "interactive" and "verbose" can also be set in config.txt;
you can then turn these flags off on the command line with +option=.
Some of the bug fixes:
- Key lookup on keyID (eg 0x12AB) fixed for -ks/-krs.
- Dearmoring of Macintosh type text files (CR only) now also works.