How to password protect gzip files on the command line?

grill_gus

I want to create some tar.gz (and possibly tar.bz2) files, using the tar command on Ubuntu 10.04. I want to password protect the file. What is the command to do this (I have Googled, but found nothing that shows how to create and extract compressed files using a password). Anyone knows how to do this?

Originally asked by morpheous on Stack Exchange (superuser) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

You have to apply the Unix philosophy to this task: one tool for each task. Tarring and compression is a job for tar and gzip or bzip2 . Crypto is a job for either gpg or openssl : Encrypt % tar cz folder_to_encrypt | \ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -e > out.tar.gz.enc Decrypt % openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -in out.tar.gz.enc | tar xz Or using gpg % gpg --encrypt out.tar.gz The openssl variant uses symmetric encryption, you would have to tell the receiving party about the used 'password' (aka 'the key'). The gpg variant uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric encryption, you use the key of the receiving party (which means that you do not have to...

Full answer by akira: https://superuser.stackexchange.com/a/162628 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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