Hey LQ,

I'm trying to encrypt some files that will be sent through email. The file is an archive of .sql files. I would like to know what is the best way to use mcrypt to encrypt this file. I see there is many options and unfortunately I don't know what kind of encryption is best nor can I seem to figure out how to decrypt the *.nc file that mcrypt makes. Any tips in the right direction would be great.

I use ccrpyt (available on slackbuilds) console based. Automatically you get encryping options 'ccencrypt' and decrypting 'ccdecrypt'.
As far as algorythms are concerned I do not change them. Read the documentation -it is optimised for the best.
As far as mcrypt goes to decrypt the encrypted files the command is 'mcrypt -d filename' (from the man pages).

Is there any way I could run the command to password encrypt the files from a cron job?

I am certain that ccrypt can be run as cron but then again this is something I would not do and so would not recommend. I believe running in cron would cause more problems then this would solve. It would depend on a lot of things like when exactly are the .sql files are generated or is this machine turned on 24x7.
A more sensible (and safe option) would be to encypt the entire partion (I mean - I assume that the .sql logs are on a different partion) so that everything that goes into that partition is automatically encrypted (somethin like aespipes is a good example).

Well I want to email the .sql files... so they have to be encrypted in some fashion. The Cron would be to have them regularly tar'd up in an archive and then emailed to an account for review and analysis.