I have a few old (VERY old) secret key rings that I would like to recover. I have recovered one and I'm sure I can recover another two. I know what their passwords were. The only problem is that they were long phrases to which can be variations. For example, was it "I like" or was it "I love"? Were there spaces between the words or not? Did I capitalize "I"? It was 20 years ago.

I can program all the wild variations myself, but I don't know how to automate all the entries. GPG has the --import parameter, but it won't accept the --password parameter with that. There doesn't seem to be anything relevant in the --import-options parameter either.

How can I do that?

You said --password.

Shouldn't it instead be:
--passphrase <string>

man gpg shows you can use that to pass it on command line. It also shows an option for using an fd (file descriptor) or just a file. It does not you can only try 1 each time so you'd have to write a loop to try it with the various values.

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