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8 The Client Tool

The dirmngr-client is a simple tool to contact a running dirmngr and test whether a certificate has been revoked — either by being listed in the corresponding CRL or by running the OCSP protocol. If no dirmngr is running, a new instances will be started but this is in general not a good idea due to the huge performance overhead.

The usual way to run this tool is either:

     dirmngr-client acert

or

     dirmngr-client <acert

Where acert is one DER encoded (binary) X.509 certificates to be tested. The return value of this command is

0
The certificate under question is valid; i.e. there is a valid CRL available and it is not listed tehre or teh OCSP request returned that that certificate is valid.
1
The certificate has been revoked
2 (and other values)
There was a problem checking the revocation state of the certificate. A message to stderr has given more detailed information. Most likely this is due to a missing or expired CRL or due to a network problem.

dirmngr-client may be called with the following options:

--version
Print the program version and licensing information. Note that you cannot abbreviate this command.
--help, -h
Print a usage message summarizing the most useful command-line options. Note that you cannot abbreviate this command.
--quiet, -q
Make the output extra brief by suppressing any informational messages.
-v
--verbose
Outputs additional information while running. You can increase the verbosity by giving several verbose commands to dirmngr, such as ‘-vv’.
--pem
Assume that the given certificate is in PEM (armored) format.
--ocsp
Do the check using the OCSP protocol and ignore any CRLs.
--force-default-responder
When checking using the OCSP protocl, force the use of the default OCSP responder. That is not to use the Reponder as given by the certificate.
--ping
Check whether the dirmngr daemon is up and running.
--cache-cert
Put the given certificate into the cache of a running dirmngr. This is mainly useful for debugging.
--validate
Validate the given certificate using dirmngr's internal validation code. This is mainly useful for debugging.
--load-crl
This command expects a list of filenames with DER encoded CRL files. All CRL will be validated and then loaded into dirmngr's cache.
--lookup
Take the remaining arguments and run a lookup command on each of them. The results are Base-64 encoded outputs (without header lines). This may be used to retrieve certificates from a server. However the output format is not very well suited if more than one certificate is returned.
--url
-u
Modify the lookup command to take an URL and not a pattern.
--local
-l
Let the lookup command only search the local cache.
--squid-mode
Run dirmngr-client in a mode suitable as a helper program for Squid's external_acl_type option.

dirmngr(1), gpgsm(1)