Password protection of archives (tar, zip etc) currently possible in UT?

uwahl

Hi all,
just a question - is a password protection possible in UT when generating a new archive with tar, zip, etc?

arubislander

@uwahl Sure, if such is possible to do from the command line on regular Ubuntu, then it is possible to do with UT from the command line.
Try googling for that.

uwahl

@arubislander
...thanks for the advice... UT is not regular Ubuntu...
The only (?) command I found in UT /bin doing compression AND password protection in one single command is " gpgtar ". With symmetric key option in my case. Any other ideas?
7zip command doing the same I could find in regular Ubuntu only, not in UT...

arubislander

@uwahl
How important is this feature to you? How much effort are you willing to expend to achieve it?

Are you looking for something user friendly, like a built in setting GUI setting in FileManager(not available atm) or an app (possible, but not sure if such already exists)?

If going the commandline route, do you intend to only stick to preinstalled packages, or are you comfortable branching out and becoming more creative and explore thingd such as (in decreasing order of official support):

installing the required tools or apps in a libertine container
manually creating a chroot environment and installing the required tools there
installing in a lxc container
installing via snap
installing in a lxd conainer
installing on the roots via apt.

Or is this just an academic query?

uwahl

Since it seems not possible at the moment to password protect/ enctrypt an usb-stick via UT, I looked for a possibility to do a partial (compressed and gpg protected) backup of my phone.
In the moment it is not possible/ difficult to do a whole directory compression or a passphrase protected gpg encryption via KArchive to build a gui.
My solution for the moment is a simple shell-script for backing up my /phablet/Downloads folder with

tar -czvf Downloads.tar Downloads
resulting in a file Downloads.tar
and
encrypting the file Downloads.tar with with a symmetric passphrase key using the gpg command:
gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo aes256 Downloads.tar
resulting in a passphrase protected file Downloads.tar.gpg

So I'll mark the thread as solved for the moment.

UT 20.04 dev on Pixel3axl

arubislander

@uwahl Glad you figured out a way to do what you wanted to achieve, all be it partially. This is what I meant when I said UT is a lot like 'regular' Ubuntu when viewed from the command line. Unless you want to be running services and such, more often than not, there is a way to get what you need, done.