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Import PGP public key by string

I want to import a PGP public key into my keychain in a script, but I don't want it to write the contents to a file. Right now my script does this:

curl http://example.com/pgp-public-key -o /tmp/pgp && gpg --import /tmp/gpg

How could I write this script so I can just call gpg --import and import the public key as a string? Thank you for your help.

Solution

  • gpg --import knows two ways of operation: it can either read from a file (for example gpg --import key.gpg) or -- if no file name is passed -- read from STDIN. curl on the other hand will print the fetched document to STDOUT if no -o parameter is given. Putting both together with a pipe will directly stream the results from curl into gpg --import:

    curl http://example.com/pgp-public-key | gpg --import