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Can you put multiple files in a GPG/PGP encrypted file?

Just wondering.

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On Linux, I'd tarball and compress the files first, then encrypt them. I do not believe GPG can encrypt multiple files in one go.

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Spot-on. PGP/GPG does encryption. In order to encrypt multiple files, you'd need to archive them in something like tar, zip, rar, etc. The newfangled commercial Windows versions of PGP may be able to do such thing (see the PGP-Zip). I do know that GPG and "classic" command line PGP does not. – Geoff Fritz Nov 30 '09 at 17:13
GPG probably never will; the idea is that you can simply encrypt a tarball instead. tar is a lot better at concatenating files than gpg is; if something replaces tar you can still use gpg to encrypt the new program's output rather than having to fix gpg to support that new file format. Notably there are exceptions to this (tar will automatically handle gzip/bzip2 files) but it's been important to Unix, Linux, GNU et al. to swap out parts of the toolchain when needed. – Broam Nov 30 '09 at 18:22
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GPG and PGP do compression (to increase security) - so encrypting a .tar is enough, no need to gzip it. – grawity Nov 30 '09 at 20:14
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