GPG: Encrypt And Decrypt Files With A Password
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GPG: Encrypt And Decrypt Files With A Password
When looking to encrypt a file, one of the best choices are to use GPG, GPG is a free service that almost all servers come with. You can encrypt and decrypt a file using GPG.
gnup
GnuPG stands for GNU Privacy Guard and GNU's tool for secure communctions and data storage.
Encrypting a file under Linux using GPG
To encrypt a single file, aka a password file run:
gpg -c password.txt
It will ask you to create a password on for the file after running that command.
You will notice that in your directory you see a file called password.txt.gpg
Now it will keep the original file as well as create the password.txt.gpg
Now I would suggest removing the orginal password.txt file
rm password.txt
Decrypting a file under Linux using GPG
Now whats the fun of encrypting the file, if you can not use it.
Well now you will need to decrypt the file to view the contents.
gpg -d password.txt.gpg
Now that will display in your terminal, say you want to modify the file, you will need to save that to a file and re encrypt it
gpg -o password.txt -d password.txt.gpg
Add/Remove information from password.txt, and re encrypt it
gpg -c password.txt && rm password.txt
Please note that if you ever forgot your password (passphrase), you cannot recover the data as it use very strong encryption.
