💾 Archived View for separateconcerns.com › 2014-10-24-cli-passwords.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
published 2014-10-24,updated 2015-08-31
These days Linux systems tend to open graphical password prompts when a CLI application needs user authentication. I don't know about you but I really don't like that.
The first offender is git, which uses x11-ssh-askpass if installed. The simplest solution would be not to install it but it is a dependency of virt-manager on Arch Linux... Thankfully you can tell git not to use it:
git config --global core.askpass ""
The second one, in my case, was pass [1]. If you try to use it in Gnome, the keyring hijacks the GPG agent and you get that message (plus a graphical prompt):
gpg: WARNING: The GNOME keyring manager hijacked the GnuPG agent. gpg: WARNING: GnuPG will not work properly - please configure that tool to not interfere with the GnuPG system!
The Gnome keyring is an annoying piece of software that replaces password prompts for several tools including SSH and GPG. you can disable it this way:
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart cd !$ cp /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-* . for i in *; do echo "Hidden=true" >> $i; done
... but then GPG will use yet another graphical prompt! To finally stay in your terminal, create the file `~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf` with the following content:
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses