GnuPG Shell Script - Refuses to read password

Question

The script below used to work on Mac OS X, but, since moving it to Ubuntu, it doesn't seem to read from the password file at all. Even when I run it from the command line, no matter what I do, I get a popup prompt asking me for the password. As this will run via cron, I don't want this to happen... I want it to read the password from the file with no prompt. To note, I did try using passphrase-fd and passphrase-file, neither of which worked...

#!/bin/sh
p=$(<pass.txt)
set -- $p
pass_phrase=$1
destination="/var/www/decrypted"
cd /var/sl_bin/
for FILE in *.pgp;
do
    FILENAME=${FILE%.pgp}
    gpg --passphrase "$pass_phrase" --output "$destination/$FILENAME" --decrypt "$FILE"
    rm -f $FILE
done

Answer 1

This works:

gpg --no-use-agent --batch --passphrase-file pass.txt --output kkkk.tar.bz2  --decrypt kkk-data.tar.bz2.gpg

Answer 2

The --passphrase-file option seems to be broken / not honored. I had to use --passphrase-fd 0 instead, like so:

cat .password | gpg --passphrase-fd 0 --output foo --decrypt foo.gpg