Reading a pgp encrypted message from Linux CLI

If you've been following my PGP\GPG blogs, you should now have PGPGPG installed on your Linux PC.
You will also have generated a PGP key and exported the Public Key, and then created an encrypted message for "Your Mate"

 If not, please read the previous blogs installing pgpgpg, exporting public key  and Encrypting a message.


All that remains is to read an encrypted message. That is the objective of this blog.
First you need to recieve an encrypted message. For this blog, I have created a message which was encrypted using "Your Name's" public key.
The message was placed in my home folder and was called "secretmessage.txt.asc" as shown below.
Check the contents of the file with the cat command.

 
As you can see, the content of the file are encrypted.
To decrypt the file use the "gpg --decrypt secretmessage.txt.asc" command.
You will be prompted for the passphrase. Then the encrypted message will be displayed.
Of course this is fine for a short message as shown, but if your message is larger you may want to extract it as a file.
This can be done using the "--output <filename>" command.
I have decrypted the "secretmessage.txt.asc" file again below, but this time I've saved the output to a file called secretmessage.txt.

 
Notice in the second "ls" there is a new file called "secretmessage.txt".
This is the content of the encrypted file. You can check this using the cat command as shown below.

 
Remember that this file may contain sensitive information, so storing it as a plain text file might not be a great idea.
I hope these blogs have been of use.