For ethical or security reasons it is sometimes necessary that information in a recfile should not be readable by unauthorized people. One way to prevent a recfile from being read is to use the security features of the operating system. A more secure way would be to encrypt the entire recfile using a free strong encryption program such as GnuPG. The disadvantage of both these methods is that the entire recfile has to be secured when it may well be the case that only certain data need to be protected.
Recutils offers a way to encrypt specified fields in a record, whilst leaving the rest in clear text.