Talk:Command Line Utilities

Pretty significant rewrite

I noticed a lot of the information on the page was essentially a print out of the program help menu, so I thought it would be more beneficial to provide a basic introduction to the command-line utilities in tutorial form, with links to the official documentation. It isn't finished, as there are a lot of topics I didn't cover (certificates being a significant topic I did not cover), but because of the magnitude of the changes, I thought it best to stop here and get feedback on the changes. I'm brand-new to the project and I'm excited contribute in a meaningful way, so please if there is any wrong information, the style is off, etc., please do pass that along.

This rewrite is essentially a reformatting of the previous version, with a lot of additional explanations from the perldocs. The bulk of the changes come from the removing of the old code samples, which were essentially just the helps menus, and the addition of code examples which again come primarily from the perldocs. There's also a table with all of the standard commands which link to their respective manpage on the main openssl site. I thought this was better because now we only have to update one set of documentation, which itself is automatically generated from the pod files.

--Jflopezfernandez (talk) 03:35, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

This new style page looks great!! Please continue with it.

A point to note about the ec key generation stuff. It is not necessary to first create an ec params file. It is simpler just to generate the key directly using genpkey and passing the pkeyopt "ec_paramgen_curve". See the man page for further details.

--Matt (talk) 08:27, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Awesome, I'll go ahead and add that in, thanks for the heads up. I'm glad you like the change; I was pretty nervous about it since it was a pretty big change and I'm still brand-new.

--Jflopezfernandez (talk) 15:27, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

During this rewrite a comment about base64 usage 64 characters per line limit and -A usage was lost

i found it while rereading one old answer i did on stack overflow see https://askubuntu.com/questions/178521/how-can-i-decode-a-base64-string-from-the-command-line reference )

--Philippe lhardy (talk) 15:43, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Philippe, sorry about that; I've gone ahead and re-added the information. Can't believe I missed that, but thanks for letting me know.

--Jflopezfernandez (talk) 16:16, 15 September 2020 (UTC)