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Comment by upon_drumhead | Hacker News Reader

What is GNU pass? It looks like people use it to refer to https://www.passwordstore.org/ which isn’t a GNU project?

I have always assumed 'GNU' pass is more of a colloquial term - possibly because 'pass' rarely results in meaningful results when searching the web, as does 'passwordstore' (although at least it does point to the actual repository. I seem to recall a few years ago googling 'password store' would not even return that on the first page).

As far as I am aware there is zero relation to GNU projects, aside from pass requiring GPG. I believe the author of pass is the same fellow who wrote wireguard.

pass is a command that simplifies reading and writing sensitive text to encrypted files using GPG encryption. It’s most often used to decrypt passwords and API credentials, copying them to the system clipboard for pasting elsewhere without writing the plaintext to the filesystem.

Paired with an encryption key stored in an isolated device like a Yubikey, it makes for a powerfully secure password system — if you like using the command line for your passwords.

I don’t know of any iOS apps that do this, but I now want one.

Thanks for the explanation, but I actually do use the software that I linked to, however, it’s not a GNU project, so I’m just confused to if it’s a widely used misnomer or it’s a completely different software package then the one I linked to.

It seems to be a misnomer on OP's part, they's also said about switching to 'gnu pass' in previous comments, but needing to get their head around GPG...

I suspect rather than suggesting it's a GNU project, OP is creating a sort of portmanteau from GnuPG and pass.

Seems to be a somewhat common misnomer online[1] and on HN[2].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gnu+pass%22

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

actually Bruce Byfield explains it in Linux Magazine:

Pass is available in the repositories of most major distributions. As usual, you can also compile from scratch, but, if you do, take note of the dependencies, especially GnuPG (GPG) [6], which creates encryption keys, and Password Generator (pwgen) [7], which generates random passwords that contain random combinations of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Without GnuPG and pwgen, you will be unable to set up Pass, much less actually use it.

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2014/158/Command-Line-...

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