Encrypting Files
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This is a FYI and you probably should keep this for future use.

Any sensitive information, such as passwords both system and private should
be stored in encrypted files, and NOT as plain text.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and GPG (Gnu PGP) is normally used for sending and
recieving encrypted mail, but it can also be used for encrypting and
decrypting files with individual passwords.  The following are details on how
you can encrypt and decrypt files using the PGP system.

First you do NOT need to have a PGP public/private key for encrypting files,
such keys are generally for the sending of encrypted mail, not files.
However GPG will insist in creating empty keyrings, even though they are not
needed.

It is posible to encrypt a file with your public key so only your private key
will decrypt, or their public key so only the private key thay created can
decrypt, this is not what were will be dealing with here.

Files encrypted with PGP are saved with the suffix ".pgp" (encrypted with
IDEA) while GPG files are saved with ".gpg" (typically CAST5 encryption).
Such a file is generally a binary file, though a option exists to create a
ascii version (known as ``ascii armoured'') which could then be safly mailed.
To do this a "-a" option is also given during encryption, no change to the
decryption is needed.

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To encrypt an existing plain text file...
  (using v2)    pgp  -c file
  (using v5)    pgpe -c file
  (gnu PGP)     gpg  -c --force-mdc file

The password to use to encrypt the file is asked for twice.
And the commands can encrypt multiple files to the same passwd.

The version 2 command may on first use ask you to just type a long
phase to initialise its random number generator, This is a once only
excercise.  Version 5 does not require you to do this, but may complain
about missing `keyrings', if you have not created your mail public and
private PGP keys. Just ignore this.

After encrypting you sould delete the original file
                rm file


To decrypt the encrypted files back to normal use...
  (using v2)  pgp   file.pgp
  (using v5)  pgpv  file.pgp
  (gnu PGP)   gpg   file.gpg


To just view a encrypted file safely (without saving the de-crypted file to
disk) you can use any of the following.  The version 5 is prefered as
version 2 PGP creates a decrypted temporary file!
  (using v2)
     pgp -m file.pgp
     pgp -f < file.pgp | less
  (using v5)
     pgpv -m file.pgp
     pgpv < file.pgp | less
  (gnu PGP)
     gpg -o - t.gpg

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For the users using VIM you can also directly edit a ".pgp" file
by creating a .vimrc file with the following...

.vimrc
=======8<--------
"
" General options
"
set nocompatible        " Use Vim defaults like multi-undo (much better!)

" Edit PGP (v5) encrypted files (.pgp)
autocmd! BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.pgp  set bin
autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.pgp  '[,']!pgpv -f
autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.pgp  set nobin
autocmd! BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.pgp  set bin
autocmd  BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.pgp  '[,']!pgpe -fc
autocmd  BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.pgp  undo
autocmd  BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.pgp  set nobin

" Edit GPG encrypted files (.gpg)
autocmd! BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg  set bin
autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg  '[,']!gpg -o -
autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg  set nobin
autocmd! BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.gpg  set bin
autocmd  BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.gpg  '[,']!gpg -c --force-mdc -o -
autocmd  BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.gpg  undo
autocmd  BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.gpg  set nobin

" Edit GZip files (.gz)
autocmd! BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gz  set bin
autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gz  '[,']!gzip -d
autocmd  BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gz  set nobin
autocmd! BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.gz  set bin
autocmd  BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.gz  '[,']!gzip
autocmd  BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.gz  undo
autocmd  BufWritePost,FileWritePost  *.gz  set nobin

=======8<--------

You can now edit (read and write) an encrypted file with
    vim file.pgp
or  vim file.gpg

This is a very safe way of updating a encrypted file as it is only decrypted
in the editors buffer.  Warning: some parts of the file may be saved
temporarially unencrypted to a ".swp" file however. further precautions may be
needed.

As a reference the `edit gzip' was included here to allow you to to directly
edit ".gz" files as well. :-)

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