Re: how do i do this with pgp?

Clearly you have not read the application note in the documentation that came with PGP. The appnote clearly states:

There is a better way of doing this in PGP 2.2, which is an environment variable called "PGPPASSFD". If this is set, it means that the FIRST thing PGP will do is read the pass phrase from this file descriptor. So, for example, one can set PGPPASSFD to "0" (zero), and then PGP will read the pass phrase from stdin as the first thing.

-derek Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, G MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) Home page: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/warlord/home_page.html warlord@MIT.EDU PP-ASEL N1NWH PGP key available