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## 2 Invoking GPG-AGENT

`gpg-agent` is a daemon to manage secret (private) keys independently from any protocol. It is used as a backend for `gpg` and `gpgsm` as well as for a couple of other utilities.

The agent is automatically started on demand by `gpg`, `gpgsm`, `gpgconf`, or `gpg-connect-agent`. Thus there is no reason to start it manually. In case you want to use the included Secure Shell Agent you may start the agent using:

    gpg-connect-agent /bye

If you want to manually terminate the currently-running agent, you can safely do so with:

    gpgconf --kill gpg-agent

You should always add the following lines to your `.bashrc` or whatever initialization file is used for all shell invocations:

    GPG_TTY=$(tty)
    export GPG_TTY

It is important that this environment variable always reflects the output of the `tty` command. For W32 systems this option is not required.

Please make sure that a proper pinentry program has been installed under the default filename (which is system dependent) or use the option `pinentry-program` to specify the full name of that program. It is often useful to install a symbolic link from the actual used pinentry (e.g. `/usr/bin/pinentry-gtk`) to the expected one (e.g. `/usr/bin/pinentry`).

See Option Index, for an index to `GPG-AGENT`’s commands and options.