Does exporting a public key on Windows 11 on the command line lead to a broken file (utf-16 LE)?

Gpg4win help-en
1

Hello,
if you happen to have Gpg4win 4.3.1 running on a Windows 11 system (and there are not enough responses yet further down) could you try exporting a public key on the command line
and see if you can import it again? That would help me to reproduce a potential defect.
gpg --armor --export SOMEID > test_export.asc
gpg --import test_export.asc

Chris J. reported getting a utf-16 LE file as result on the mailing list and I may lack a test system were this can be reproduced. [Gpg4win-users-en] --export incompatible with --import

(If you want to import and export my pubkey, you would find it here: https://intevation.de/~bernhard/bernhard_gpgkey.asc. )
If you can reproduce, please show the first few lines of the exported file here.

Thanks! Bernhard

2

The problem is understood, thanks to Ingo. (See the email thread linked above).

Using something like gpg --armor --export-key XYZ >pubkey_xyz.asc which is a redirection on Powershell whill lead to a text file that gpg cannot import anymore.

The error message looks like

gpg: [don't know]: partial length invalid for packet type 63
gpg: read_block: read error: Invalid packet
gpg: import from 'gpg-export-on-powershell.asc' failed: Invalid keyring
gpg: Anzahl insgesamt bearbeiteter Schlüssel: 0

A solution is use the --output option of gpg. :slight_smile: