2.4 Use of some signals

A running gpg-agent may be controlled by signals, i.e. using the kill command to send a signal to the process.

Here is a list of supported signals:

SIGHUP

This signal flushes all cached passphrases and if the program has been started with a configuration file, the configuration file is read again. Only certain options are honored: quiet, verbose, debug, debug-all, debug-level, debug-pinentry, no-grab, pinentry-program, pinentry-invisible-char, default-cache-ttl, max-cache-ttl, ignore-cache-for-signing, s2k-count, no-allow-external-cache, allow-emacs-pinentry, no-allow-mark-trusted, disable-scdaemon, and disable-check-own-socket. scdaemon-program is also supported but due to the current implementation, which calls the scdaemon only once, it is not of much use unless you manually kill the scdaemon.

SIGTERM

Shuts down the process but waits until all current requests are fulfilled. If the process has received 3 of these signals and requests are still pending, a shutdown is forced.

SIGINT

Shuts down the process immediately.

SIGUSR1

Dump internal information to the log file.

SIGUSR2

This signal is used for internal purposes.