You can read this article for explanation about the key flags (see Key Flag Subpacket section). Your primary key (used for signing) is the one that is preceded with "pub". You can see the private part with "gpg --list-secret-keys" (the one that starts with "sec"). The sub-key (used for encryption) is the one that preceded with "sub" (public sub-key) or "ssb" (secret sub-key). Check the answer ...
when I export a gpg private or public key, and specify armored as a switch, I get plain text key, however, the gnupgp website seems to state that these keys are actually encrypted. What's the point...
gpg - What is the armored option for in GnuPG? - Unix & Linux Stack ...
I have generated keys using GPG, by executing the following command gpg --gen-key Now I need to export the key pair to a file; i.e., private and public keys to private.pgp and public.pgp, respecti...
How to export a GPG private key and public key to a file
I did a clean install of Arch Linux and imported my backed up gpg private key. As a sanity check I ran: gpg --list-keys Everything showed up as normal except for the uid which now reads: uid [ unk...
gnu - gpg --list-keys command outputs uid [ unknown ] after importing ...
Then when using gpg, your ~/.gnupg directory should be backuped with as many precaution as the enciphered files. You also have the gpg --export > export and gpg --export-secret-keys > export commands to export all yours keys in a pair of files you should backup instead. But these precautions must be done before losing the disk.