not exactly... what I am doing is cating a file that has the clear text passphrase in it then piping this output as inout to the gpg binary for decryption like so:

cat file |gpg --passphrase-fd 0 --decrypt --output oldfile newfile
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I do not understand what

my $enc_pass = shift( @{ [ <$file> ] } );
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is doing? Is this the same as:

for (;<FH>;) {
  print $_;
}
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what does $gpg_out have in it?