at Tuesday, October 01, 2002 6:10 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd@echeque.com> was seen to say:

Not so. It turns out the command line is now different in PGP 6.5.8. It is now pgp -sta to clearsign, instead of pgp -sa. (Needless to say the t option does not appear in pgp -h *nods* its in the 6.5 Command Line Guide, but as "identifies the input file as a text file" The CLG is the best reference for this though - as it explictly lists sta as the correct option in section Ch2>Common PGP Functions>Signing Messages>Sign a plaintext ASCII file. I could email you a copy of the PDF of that (its about 500K) if you wish.

The clearsigning now seems to work a lot better than I recall the clearsigning working in pgp 2.6.2. They now do some canonicalization, or perhaps they guess lots of variants until one checks out. its canonicalization - again according to the CLG (CH3>Sending ASCII text files to different machine environments)

Perhaps they hid the clear signing because it used not to work, but having fixed it they failed to unhide it? its just an evolution. IIRC the command line tool was based at least partially on the unix version of pgp, which always had different command line switches. It would be nice if behaviour was more backwards compatable, but they *did* document it in the official M that you should RTF :)