pinentry-qt4 (1)

pinentry-qt4 [OPTION...]

pinentry-qt4 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-qt implements a PIN entry dialog using the Qt 4 tool kit, so it is especially suitable for users of KDE 4. If the X Window System is not active then an alternative text-mode dialog will be used. There are other flavors that implement PIN entry dialogs using other tool kits.

pinentry-qt4 is typically used internally by gpg-agent. Users don't normally have a reason to call it directly.

--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-qt4; 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-qt4).

--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-qt4. They are required because pinentry-qt4 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.

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

The full documentation for pinentry-qt4 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.

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