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I am trying to transfer my gpg secret keyring from gpg1 (1.4.21) to gpg2 (2.1.15) using

gpg2 --import ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg

gpg2 is asking for the passphrases of all the secret keys in the keyring.

Why would it require the passphrases at this stage (I should only have to supply them when using the keys) and how can I prevent this, i.e. import the keyring without supplying passphrases?

System is Arch Linux, kernel 4.7.6. Thanks.

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1 Answer 1

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The issue was explained here in the GnuPG bugtracker; I did not see that earlier today.

The solution is: 

gpg2 --batch --import ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg
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    Thanks! I was doing exactly this on a headless server using shell redirection, e.g. gpg2 --import < my-keys and for unknown reasons this didn't show me any passphrase prompt at all, but only a cryptic gpg: error building skey array: Inappropriate ioctl for device. Hopefully googling that message will send people here from now on.
    – jlh
    Commented Sep 29, 2017 at 11:40
  • My slightly-different cryptic error message when running headless was error sending to agent: Operation cancelled. There are other answers out there citing this error message that recommend using --batch, but this answer is the only one I found that went the extra mile by linking to the root cause of why this workaround is necessary.
    – Rusty Shackleford
    Commented Jul 30, 2019 at 16:13
  • For anyone who gets the Inappropriate ioctl for device error, try export GPG_TTY=$(tty) per github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/2798 then do the batch import
    – Doug Ayers
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 20:32

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