Getting information from armord gpg public key

Question

When given a file with an armored public GnuPG key, a file (pubkey.gpg) that was created with:

gpg -r 0xDEADBEEF --export --armored > pubkey.gpg

What is the best way to get information such as the finger print in that file, without importing it into my keyring?

The best way I found so far (and I am not happy with) is:

gpg --dry-run --import pubkey.gpg

Naturally, I grepped the gpg man page, but didn't find an obvious solution.

Gilles · Answer 1 · 2010-08-08 12:53:57Z

I don't know that gpg has an option for this, but here's a more flexible workaround for extracting information from the key file:

mkdir temp-gnupg-dir
export GNUPGHOME=temp-gnupg-dir
gpg --import pubkey.gpg
gpg --list-keys
rm -r temp-gnupg-dir

Instead of the GNUPGHOME environment variable, you can pass --homedir=temp-gnupg-dir to every gpg invocation.

This is not pretty, but it is useful to know what options are not available, and this is a solution. So I thank you for that.

Claudio Floreani · Answer 2 · 2012-02-15 17:29:48Z

You can checkout Kazu Yamamoto's PGP packet visualizer which displays the packet format of OpenPGP (RFC 4880) and PGP version 2 (RFC 1991).

To fetch and compile:

git clone http://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/pgpdump
cd pgpdump
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ && make && sudo make install

Using it is even simpler:

pgpdump pubkey.gpg

There is also a cgi-bin interface available on this site: http://www.pgpdump.net/cgi-bin/pgpdump

2 Answers