You're right, I haven't absorbed much of the gpg man pages,
although I have the perl version of gpg->verify()
working. I can command line extract the original tar
file from a .gpg signed file with gpg -d -o fn.tar.gpg fn.tar.gpg

What I've been trying unsuccessfully to do now is
gpg->decrypt() .gpg files ranging in size from 100k
to 12 meg.