Quicken to GnuCash (Windows) (Charles Day)

[Donald Allen]

Regarding Charles Day's very reasonable desire to maintain his gnucash
file(s) in encrypted form, I agree with him -- it would be a very
useful addition to gnucash to provide an encryption option.

A stopgap partial solution for Charles: maintain your gnucash file
encrypted and use something like the following script:

#! /bin/bash

ENCRYPTED_GNUCASH_FILE=$1
TEMPORARY_WORKING_FILE=`mktemp -p /tmp`
RECIPIENT=$2

gpg --output $TEMPORARY_WORKING_FILE $ENCRYPTED_GNUCASH_FILE

gnucash $TEMPORARY_WORKING_FILE

gpg -e -r "$RECIPIENT" --output=$ENCRYPTED_GNUCASH_FILE $TEMPORARY_WORKING_FILE

If you name the script more_secure_gnucash, you would invoke it as

more_secure_gnucash <encrypted gnucash file> <recipient>

where 'recipient' is the identifier of your key-pair, 'Don Allen' in
my case. gpg will ask you questions when you run the script. Don't
forget to give it execute permission. I did some cursory testing of
this and it seems to work, but no guarantees express or implied :-) If
you correct it or improve it, please let us know.

This is not absolutely secure, obviously, because the file exists
unencrypted in your filesystem while gnucash is running, but it does
so under a randomly generated name. But it would reduce the
probability of thievery unless and until gnucash acquires the
encryption capability done right.

/Don Allen