paperkey command not found

Introduction

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

paperkey: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: paperkey: command not found

Solutions to paperkey: command not found

How To Fix paperkey: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu paperkey is provided by paperkey package.

paperkey is:

A reasonable way to achieve a long term backup of OpenPGP (GnuPG, PGP, etc) keys is to print them out on paper. The reasoning behind this is that paper and ink has amazingly long retention qualities - far longer than the magnetic or optical means that are generally used to back up computer data.

Due to metadata and redundancy, OpenPGP secret keys are significantly larger than just the “secret bits”. In fact, the secret key contains a complete copy of the public key. Since the public key generally doesn’t need to be escrowed (most people have many copies of it on various keyservers, web pages, etc), only extracting the secret parts can be a real advantage.

Paperkey extracts just those secret bytes and prints them. To reconstruct, you re-enter those bytes (whether by hand or via OCR) and paperkey can use them to transform your existing public key into a secret key.

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

sudo apt-get -y install paperkey

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

You can also use apt command to install paperkey.

sudo apt -y install paperkey

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

sudo aptitude install paperkey

Summary

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