File encryption and decryption made easy with GPG

GPG is a popular and powerful Linux file encryption tool. Learn how to use GPG to keep private files private.

The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG or gpg) tool is a native/baseos security tool for encrypting files. According to the gpg man page:

gpg is the OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy) part of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). It is a tool to provide digital encryption and signing services using the OpenPGP standard. gpg features complete key management and all the bells and whistles you would expect from a full OpenPGP implementation.

The gpg utility has a lot of options, but fortunately for us, encrypting and decrypting are easy to do and only require that you know three options for quick use: Create or encrypt (-c), decrypt (-d), and extract and decrypt (no option).