September 20, 2023

GPG: Show or export GPG public key

$ gpg --export -a john 

will show the public key of john in the terminal - which is not convenient if you want to send it to someone.

$ gpg --export -a john > public.key

will export the public key to a file which you can send via email or published on a webpage¹.

The option -a is short for --armor which, as stipulated in the manual of GnuPG, “takes output from commands and prints it in format that can be safely e-mailed.”².

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1. https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x56.html↩︎

2. https://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/r1290.html↩︎

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