Digressing from the past couple of posts - I just wrote this little utility for myself that will do file encryption/decryption from the command line. I figured that some of you might also find this useful so I am sharing it out here.

This is no rocket science – simple usage of the API - but gives you reasonably good locking and a handy tool. The 256 bit Rijndael encryption implies that you can provide a password that is upto 16 chars in length. The encryption algorithm is a symmetric one – which means that you use the same password to decrypt the file.

This is also very rudimentary – no error checks and blah done: just enough code to get the job done.

Usage:

This is how you encrypt a file

> enc +password foobar.txt

Creating:2004-12-01--1206711.enc (foobar.txt)

It creates a new file called ‘2004-12-01--1206711.enc’ using the current date-time. This file is always a few bytes larger than the original. To extract the foobar.txt again you would say –

>enc -password 2004-12-01--1206711.enc

If you did not wish to extract the contents of an enc file, but you just what to see what file it contains, you say –

>enc ?password 2004-12-01--1206711.enc

2004-12-01--1206711.enc ==> foobar.txt

The exe here is a .Net 2.0 executable. The source is also there, so you can compile under your pet version of the runtime.  To compile

> csc enc.cs

And of course, it can encrypt any kind of file.

Download

Let me know if you want some simple switches/features added.