Pretty Curved Privacy (also known as pcp1) is an open source and complely free command-line software implemented in C and designed from the offset to be used for encrypting files under GNU/Linux, BSD and other UNIX-like operating systems. It runs on 64-bit (x86_64) and 32-bit (x86) computers.

It is called Pretty Curved Privacy because it uses the elliptic curve cryptography method for the actual encryption (CURVE25519 by Dan J. Bernstein), which has not yet been compromised by the NSA (National Security Agency).

CURVE25519 is a non-standard, state-of-the-art Diffie-Hellman function that can be used on a wide range of applications. Because of this, Pretty Curved Privacy should be considered an experimental software and it should be used only by experienced users who have some knowledge about encryption technologies.

To install and use the Pretty Curved Privacy program in your GNU/Linux operating system, you must download the latest release of the project from Softpedia using the dedicated download button above, save the archive somewhere on your PC.

Extract its contents using the built-in archive manager utility and open a terminal emulator application to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/pretty-curved-privacy-0.2.0).

Then, still in the terminal emulator window, run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program. After a successful compilation, run the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command if you’re root to install it system wide.

You can find a comprehensive Quick Start tutorial on how to use the Pretty Curved Privacy tool to encrypt files on a GNU/Linux operating system on the official website of the project (see link below).