Red Hat

Hello,
I wanted to simple command to encrypt a file. Using google I got a command "crypt". I could test it very well on Sun solaris. My red hat system says "command not found".Can you please tell me if I can find that package on the cd!!!

crypt is a very weak encryption program that should no longer be used. This was actually true 25 years ago. At this point, crypt is sadly obsolete. You need a strong encryption algorithm and one of the best currently available is AES-256. No one has broken it yet. The US government currently allows the use of AES-256 to protect Top Secret information.

I suggest that you use gpg to encrypt your file, but you must specify the encryption algorithm like this:

gpg -c --cipher-algo aes256 secret.txt

and to decrypt the file:

gpg secret.txt.gpg


GNU Privacy Guard, gpg, seems to simply come with our Linux systems. It is available on sunfreeware.com for Solaris. I also found a package for XP at the The GNU Privacy Guard - GnuPG.org site (navigate to the download page).

Hello,
I have used gpg as per your reply..It is working perfectly fine.I am able to encrypt and decrypt files.For directories,I had to convert them into ".tar" format and then use this gpg.Is this the only solution or is there any other command which can encrypt both files and directories ?

I did go through the man page of "gpg".Can you please tell me what other options of gpg can be used generally.....