I would need that too because I generate a lot of configuration rpms with the application xml2hostconf ( http://xml2hostconf.sf.net ). gpg-agent together with rpmbuild would be a nice combination to do this. It doesn't seem possible at the momement: http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2004-January/021302.html I haven't looked closely into this yet. In my trials I laborated a while with rpmbuild and some --define command line options, but I soon found out it is actually rpmbuild that asks for the passphrase. cheers, Erik Sjölund