If you go with adding a passphrase to the drive keep in mind that if it’s a unique one you may end up forgetting it since you won’t normally be using it. Even if you set it to the same passphrase as root partition, if you ever change passphrase for root you might forget to change home passphrase.
I would probably just make a physical copy of the key file. It’s just 32 bytes (no, larger key file doesn’t make things any more secure) so you can hexdump -C
it and copy the key on a piece of paper.
It’s not. You keep insisting that ^D doesn’t send EOF and yet:
^D is the EOF character. The thing is that in C every line of a text file must be terminated by a new-line. And so, when you end a file with ^D without a return, you get funky results.