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Most encryption programs seem to be made for encrypting a folder permanently.

I, however, simply want to encrypt a folder once and send it as an email attachment to someone. I feel like TrueCrypt, encfs, and others are used for constant encryption.

What program can do this?

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Unix philosophy favors composability over monolythic design. In this sense, your problem can be split into two separate problems:

- How do I bundle a folder into a single file suitable for sending?

You can do that with tar command:

tar zcf ./myfiles.tar.gz ./myfolder/ 

- How do I encrypt a single file?

There's already an answer for that. For example:

openssl des3 < ./myfiles.tar.gz > ./myfiles.tar.gz.des3

To decrypt the file you can then use

openssl des3 -d < ./myfiles.tar.gz.des3 > ./myfiles-decrypted.tar.gz

And, finally, to "untar" the file into a directory:

tar zxf ./myfiles-decrypted.tar.gz
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  • You're right, I should've thought of it that way. Thanks. Feb 21, 2015 at 3:22

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