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dirmngr and test whether a certificate has been revoked — either by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- The certificate has been revoked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)