running gpg from another program

[Chris Black]

Hi, I'm messing around with writing some C code so I can call gpg from 
another program (like a frontend).
As for the passphrase, you have an option to specify a file descriptor to 
read the passphrase from, but you say to avoid using this option if possible.
So should I do some sort of chat/expect thing where I fork a gpg process, 
wait for the passphrase prompt, and then have the user enter the passphrase 
in a dialog and pass that to gpg's stdin?
What would be the best way of doing this so I can then dump a text buffer 
through gpg's stdin for it to encrypt?
I've already figured out the "--output -" syntax to specify stdout for the 
output.

I'm thinking (for encrypt):
exec "gpg --encrypr --armor -r userid --output -"
and clone the stdin/stdout of that process...
then read that proc's stdout until I see "Enter passphrase:" and then 
write the passphrase to the gpg proc's stdin, then dump the input text buffer 
to gpg's stdin and then read and record the output on gpg's stdout.

Is there a better/easier/more accepted way to do this?

Thanks for any info, and yes, I am looking through the code of some pgp 
frontends.

Chris