GnuPG Shell Script - Refuses to read password

Question

The script below used to work on Mac OS X, but, since moving it to Ubuntu, it doesn't seem to read from the password file at all. Even when I run it from the command line, no matter what I do, I get a popup prompt asking me for the password. As this will run via cron, I don't want this to happen... I want it to read the password from the file with no prompt. To note, I did try using passphrase-fd and passphrase-file, neither of which worked...

#!/bin/sh
p=$(<pass.txt)
set -- $p
pass_phrase=$1
destination="/var/www/decrypted"
cd /var/sl_bin/
for FILE in *.pgp;
do
    FILENAME=${FILE%.pgp}
    gpg --passphrase "$pass_phrase" --output "$destination/$FILENAME" --decrypt "$FILE"
    rm -f $FILE
done

Answer 1

Your problem is probably that $passphrase is null. On Ubuntu sh is symlinked to dash which doesn't understand $(<file_name) in the same way that Bash does (but doesn't issue an error either).

You can change your shebang to:

#!/bin/bash

or use $(cat pass.txt)

Also, why not combine the second, third and fourth lines?: pass_phrase=$(<pass.txt) (or pass_phrase=($(<pass.txt)) if you're trying to strip off all but the first "word" in the file).

^{Your previous question}

Answer 2

use

#!/bin/bash

or

#!/usr/bin/env bash

as your first line instead of #!/bin/sh

As for your pass phrase problem, you should probably try to use some automatic mechanism. check the gpg documentation for information. I don't use gpg, but you can check out gpg-agent.