Import personal GPG key in Seahorse

[Carborundum]

I want to transfer a GPG key that I occasionally use to sign emails from one computer to another. Seahorse allows exporting and importing of keys, but when I try to import the key it becomes public instead of private. As a result, I can't use it to sign anything.

How can I import the file in such a manner that the key becomes private instead of public?

[Carborundum]

I figured it out. As far as I can tell, this is not possible to do from the GUI. Instead, I had to run the following from a terminal:

gpg --export-secret-keys -a "<Key>" > private.key

This exports the personal key <Key> to the file 'private.key'. This can then be moved to the target computer and imported with:

gpg --allow-secret-key-import --import private.key

Now, from what I can discern from the man page for gpg, this is not really how things are supposed to be done. --export-secret-keys is said to be "not very usefull", as well as being a "security risk". --allow-secret-key-import is said to be "obsolete". Nevertheless, this works, and I haven't been able to find a better way to accomplish this. Perhaps I just don't understand how gpg keys are meant to be used.

[chrisinspace]

Thanks for posting this. It was exactly what I was looking for. Worked perfectly.