gpg-agent command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

gpg-agent: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: gpg-agent: command not found

Solutions to gpg-agent: command not found

How To Fix gpg-agent: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu gpg-agent is provided by gpg-agent package.

gpg-agent is:

GnuPG is GNU’s tool for secure communication and data storage. It can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures. It includes an advanced key management facility and is compliant with the proposed OpenPGP Internet standard as described in RFC4880.

This package contains the agent program gpg-agent which handles all secret key material for OpenPGP and S/MIME use. The agent also provides a passphrase cache, which is used by pre-2.1 versions of GnuPG for OpenPGP operations. Without this package, trying to do secret-key operations with any part of the modern GnuPG suite will fail.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install gpg-agent

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install gpg-agent.

sudo apt -y install gpg-agent

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install gpg-agent

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix gpg-agent command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.