PINENTRY-CURSES(1)					      General Commands Manual						PINENTRY-CURSES(1)

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 par-
       ticular 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  pinen-
	      try-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)