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Can you put multiple files in a GPG/PGP encrypted file?
Just wondering.
Daniel
Posted 2009-11-30T16:48:15.217
Reputation: 1 365
Does PGP work like Zip sometimes?
Answers
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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.
Broam
Posted 2009-11-30T16:48:15.217
Reputation: 3 831
Nothing wrong with tarballing first, but actually you can encrypt and decrypt multiple files in one go with the --encrypt-files and --decrypt-files options. For example: gpg -a --encrypt-files -r 0xDEADBEEF *.txt # this will result in a .txt.asc file for each .txt file which is encrypted to 0xDEADBEEF – Ben – 2015-06-19T10:00:14.290
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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 – 2009-11-30T17:13:13.9201GPG 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 – 2009-11-30T18:22:54.870
2GPG and PGP do compression (to increase security) - so encrypting a
.taris enough, no need to gzip it. – user1686 – 2009-11-30T20:14:17.330