1. altering the %ENV hash won't work unless you spawn a child process.
2. you may not be printing everything to the WRITER filehandle. i had a similar problem with Open3 and commands. use join to get a string, and print THAT to the WRITER handle. your pgp program is probably waiting for input.
3. and i may be wrong on this point: you need to create the filehandles with  my $READER = FileHandle->new() to properly use the methods in FileHandle. so, you may not be autoflushing your handles and running into buffer issues.

That was a typo. In my source I do have it written as my $pid = open2(\*READER, \*WRITER, "pgp -feast $user_id"). Plus I have even tryed it as my $pid = open2(\*READER, \*WRITER, 'pgp -feast zzSPECTREz')

Thanks for catching my err.
zzSPECTREz

My (old) version of PGP encrypted files fine. Just write your message to a text file (in the tmp or c:\temp directory) and then read the final file. It used to be pgp -e filename.txt etc.etc.

If at this point you start pointing out that you are worried about someone reading your harddrive sector by sector then you should probably go to the effort of installing one of the PGP modules from CPAN.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

I have been able to get it to work if Im either just reading or just writing to pgp by opening it with a pipe. The problem is I want to do this without a temporary file.

The -f option as explained in the pgp documentation is used for UNIX-style filter mode to read from standard input and write to standard output. So I would think that you should be able to get this to work, and Im just doing something wrong.

Looking to see how the modules work, I noticed that they are just do what Im trying to do. For example, looking at the module PGP::Pipe.pm I see that it is using the basic same method: $result = open3 ($fin, $fout, $ferr, "$self->{PGPexec} $baseopts $args") || croack "PGP command error"; So the error is in my code somewhere. I think Ill try to figure out how this module is doing stuff.

Thanks.
zzSPECTREz

For anyone who is interested, I found a solution and will post it for anyone else having problems working with open3. I got the following code to work on linux, but am still trying to figure out how to get it to work on my win2k box.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# pgp_test.pl <user_id> <passphrase>
use strict;
use IPC::Open3;

my $encrypt_opts = '+force +batchmode +verbose=1 -fea';
my $decrypt_opts = '+force +batchmode +verbose=1 -f';

my $key        = shift || 'zzSPECTREz';
my $passphrase = shift || '###MYSECRET KEY##';

sub encrypt () {
  my ($user_key, $text) = @_;
  my $pid = open3(\*PGPIN,\*PGPOUT,\*PGPERR,"pgp $encrypt_opts $user_k
+ey");
  print PGPIN $text;
  close (PGPIN);
  my $output = join ('',<PGPOUT>);
  return $output;
}

sub decrypt () {
  my ($text) = @_;
  my $pid = open3(\*PGPIN,\*PGPOUT,\*PGPERR,"pgp $decrypt_opts -z '$pa
+ssphrase'");
  print PGPIN $text;
  close(PGPIN);
  my $output = join ('',<PGPOUT>);
  return $output;
}

print "\nTEST PGP\n\n";
print "ENTER TEXT TO ENCRYPT: ";
my $data = <STDIN>;

my $enc_data = &encrypt ($key,$data);
print "\nDATA ENCRYPTED:\n$enc_data\n\n";

my $dec_data = &decrypt ($enc_data);
print "DATA DECRYPTED:\n$dec_data\n\n";
[download]

zzSPECTREz