Question

I am using dozens of different web services, and I keep a password file in a remote Linux machine. The file contains my usernames, passwords and answers for security question.

This server happens to be offline to often, and I’m looking for a way to keep the password file on my own computer, or on a service like DropBox. Obviously, I want to keep the file encrypted, but handy – I want to be able to print its contents using one shell (or cygwin) command, perhaps using a passphrase.

Any good ideas how to do it?

Answer 1

You can use GPG’s symmetric option to encrypt files with pass-phrases.

gpg --symmetric filename

That will result in an encrypted file named filename.gpg. To redirect the output to STDOUT instead of a .gpg file:

gpg --symmetric -o - filename

You can later decrypt the file with:

gpg --decrypt filename.gpg