PMCANON(1)

NAME
pmcanon - put a news article in canonical format for signature checking

SYNOPSIS
pmcanon[file]

DESCRIPTION
Pmcanon accepts an article from the named file (or standard input if not specified), selects certain of the header fields, and performs certain transformations intended to defeat unintentional mangling by news transport programs. The resulting article is written to standard output, and is suitable to have a PGP signature generated or checked for it.

The output produced consists (in order) of a sorted list, one per line, of newsgroups; the From:, Subject:, and Message-ID: lines, and the body of the article (everything after the first empty line). Other header lines are discarded.

The body is further processed by deleting all blank lines, deleting trailing whitespace on lines, prefixing lines beginning with "--", "From", "Subject", and a single "." with "- ", ">", ">" and ".", respectively. These modifications are safe, in that an article which has already had such modifications will fail to meet the criterion to have them happen again. Thus what was used as input when a signature was generated should still be the same when checked for validity, even if some of these changes have happened along the delivery path.

SEE ALSO
pmapp(1), pmcheck(1), PGP manual.

AUTHOR
Greg Rose, RoSecure Software.