initializing/unlocking key explicitely with gpg-agent

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Donnerstag, 5. Juni 2025 18:24:43 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Michael 
Richardson wrote:
> I would in general, be happy to login to my desktop when remote, and then
> invoke some command that would unlock my keys for awhile.  Using
> pinentry-curses or pinentry-tty if needed.  I know that some people resort
> to running a screen just so that gpg-agent has a $GPG_TTY which it can
> always talk to.
> 
> As far as I can tell, there is not a way to this with gpg-agent-connect.
> Maybe I'm just missing something.

Unless I'm missing something the PRESET_PASSPHRASE command is what you are 
looking for:

$ gpg-connect-agent "help PRESET_PASSPHRASE" /bye
# PRESET_PASSPHRASE [--inquire] [--restricted] \
#                   <string_or_keygrip> <timeout> [<hexstring>]
# 
# Set the cached passphrase/PIN for the key identified by the keygrip
# to passwd for the given time, where -1 means infinite and 0 means
# the default (currently only a timeout of -1 is allowed, which means
# to never expire it).  If passwd is not provided, ask for it via the
# pinentry module unless --inquire is passed in which case the passphrase
# is retrieved from the client via a server inquire.  The option
# --restricted can be used to put the passphrase into the cache used
# by restricted connections.

You may have to add "allow-preset-passphrase" to your gpg-agent.conf.

Regards,
Ingo
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