NAME

       pinentry-curses - PIN or pass-phrase entry dialog for GnuPG

SYNOPSIS

       pinentry-curses [OPTION...]

DESCRIPTION

       pinentry-curses  is  a program that allows for secure entry of PINs or pass phrases.  That
       means it tries to take care that the  entered  information  is  not  swapped  to  disk  or
       temporarily  stored anywhere.  This functionality is particularly useful for entering pass
       phrases when using encryption software such as GnuPG or e-mail clients using the same.  It
       uses an open protocol and is therefore not tied to particular software.

       pinentry-curses  implements  a PIN entry dialog using the curses tool kit, meaning that it
       is useful for users working in text mode without the X Window  System.   There  are  other
       flavors  that  implement  PIN entry dialogs that use an X tool kit.  If you have installed
       any of the latter programs then this program  is  not  necessary  because  the  X  flavors
       automatically fall back to text mode if X is not active.

       pinentry-curses  is  typically  used internally by gpg-agent.  Users don't normally have a
       reason to call it directly.

OPTIONS

       --version
              Print the program version and licensing information.

       --help Print a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line options.

       --debug, -d
              Turn on some debugging.  Mostly useful for the maintainers.   Note  that  this  may
              reveal sensitive information like the entered pass phrase.

       --enhanced, -e
              Ask  for  timeouts  and  insurance,  too.   Note  that  this is currently not fully
              supported.

       --no-global-grab, -g
              Grab the keyboard only when the window is focused.  Use  this  option  if  you  are
              debugging  software  using  pinentry-curses;  otherwise  you  may not be able to to
              access your X session anymore (unless you  have  other  means  to  connect  to  the
              machine to kill pinentry-curses).

       --parent-wid N
              Use  window  ID N as the parent window for positioning the window.  Note, that this
              is not fully supported by all flavors of pinentry.

       --display STRING, --ttyname STRING,  --ttytype  STRING,  --lc-type  STRING,  --lc-messages
       STRING
              These  options  are used to pass localization information to pinentry-curses.  They
              are required because pinentry-curses is usually called by some  background  process
              which  does  not  have  any  information on the locale and terminal to use.  Assuan
              protocol options are an alternative way to pass these information.

SEE ALSO

       pinentry-gtk-2(1), pinentry-qt4(1), gpg(1), gpg-agent(1)

       The full documentation for pinentry-curses is maintained as  a  Texinfo  manual.   If  the
       pinentry-doc package is installed, the command

              info pinentry

       should give you access to the complete manual.

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Peter Eisentraut for the Debian project.

                                           27 Jan 2005                         PINENTRY-CURSES(1)