.\" -*-nroff-*- .TH keyring 5 "5 June 1999" Catacomb .SH NAME keyring \- description of Catacomb keyring files .SH DESCRIPTION Keyring files are line-oriented text files. It is recommended that programs use only the provided interface for reading and modifying keyring files for consistency of locking and representation: this description is provided for the benefit of administrators attempting to understand or repair keyring files. .PP Lines containing only whitespace and lines whose first non-whitespace character is .RB ` # ' are ignored, but are not written back to the file. Thus, the comment facility is not particularly useful. .PP Each remaining line describes a key. Key descriptions consist of between 4 and six whitespace-separated fields. The final comment field may contain whitespace characters. The fields are, in order: .TP .B type The key's type string, set when the key was created. .TP .B "key data" The actual key, Base64 encoded, as described in RFC2045. .TP .B "expiry time" The time at which this key expires, represented as an integer, in the format returned by the .BR time (2) system call. .TP .B "deletion time" The time at which this key should be deleted, using the same representation as the expiry time. The special value 0 signifies that the key should be deleted on expiry. .TP .B attributes The key's attributes, encoded using the `form-urlencoded' encoding defined in RFC1866. This field is optional: if it is omitted, the key has no attributes. Alternatively, if there are no attributes, this field may be given as a single dash .RB ` \- '. .TP .B comment The comment field. This field is optional. It may contain whitespace. It is deliberately not included as an attribute, since the urlencoded nature of attributes makes them hard to read when perusing a keyring file. .PP It is not envisaged that the file format will change in the future. Any extensions will be made by defining new attributes. .SH AUTHOR Mark Wooding,