Bitcoin Forum

How can I check that restoring from the seed would work, without disrupting my currently existing wallet? Assuming I only have one computer to work with (although of course I have USB drives available).
Sorry if it's a stupid question, but I couldn't find a direct reference to it anywhere.

Overview:

sign a message with your existing copy of your wallet. keep this text file handy.
restore your wallet to a new wallet file.
using the restored wallet, verify the message signature.

If you're using linux, I can provide you a script.

You can restore the same seed in a different wallet by using the -w flag. On linux: electrum -w ~/.electrum/newwallet.dat

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try it out tonight.

Finding it difficult..
In the GUI I can see a list of commands on the console (using help()), but I can't find any documentation on how to use those commands. So for example I see a command signmessage, but I have no idea what its arguments should be (apparently there should be 3).

Also I'm not sure how to get a command line version of Electrum to work on my Windows machine. If I cd to the electrum exe it just opens the GUI or fails silently when I try to pass it arguments.

Should I just go to the source on github to look for documentation? The main website seems to just have a few brief descriptions of certain actions.

I just recently updated the help output with more details on the usage. It has not yet been pushed to a new release, so you'll have to pull down the current master to make use of it.

OK thanks. Just quick question though, what address should I use as the first argument to signmessage?

Edit: it's OK I figured out how sign and verify works by looking at the source :)

Now on to the next bit..

$ ./electrum help signmessage
Sign a message with a key
Syntax: signmessage <address> <message>
If you want to lead or end a message with spaces, or want double spaces inside the message make sure you quote the string. I.e. " Hello  This is a weird String "

Right, thanks. In the console (the console inside the GUI, not the command line) I find the restore command doesn't work - it's not recognised even though it's listed under help().

I'm trying to create a new wallet from seed. I'll try the -w flag recommended above.

Yes, using electrum -w newwallet.dat worked well.
Thanks to both of you - I feel a bit safer and I also learned something :)