Provide password to ssh command inside bash script Without the usage of public keys and Expect

Question

I want to use SSH inside a script  but this script is not going to be executed on my machine   In my implementation there are two limitations     I can not work outside shell s standards therefore i can not use expect because i do not know if it will be available on this machine  I can not expect that this machine will have public keys for the SSH    What are the possible options-solutions    How can i provide ssh with the requested password with an automated and secure way without adding extra dependencies   Will it be possible to provide the password inside the script   Thank you all in advance

User · Answer

Install sshpass  then launch the command   sshpass -p  yourpassword  ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking no yourusername hostname

User · Answer

First of all  Don t put secrets in clear text unless you know why it is a safe thing to do  i e  you have assessed what damage can be done by an attacker knowing the secret    If you are ok with putting secrets in your script  you could ship an ssh key with it and execute in an ssh-agent shell      usr bin env ssh-agent  usr bin env bash KEYFILE  mktemp  cat  lt  lt  EOF  gt    KEYFILE  -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----           EOF ssh-add   KEYFILE     do your ssh things here       Remove the key file  rm -f   KEYFILE    A benefit of using ssh keys is that you can easily use forced commands to limit what the keyholder can do on the server   A more secure approach would be to let the script run ssh-keygen -f    ssh my-script-key to create a private key specific for this purpose  but then you would also need a routine for adding the public key to the server

User · Answer

AFAIK there is no possibility beside from using keys or expect if you are using the command line version ssh  But there are library bindings for the most programming languages like C  python  php        You could write a program in such a language  This way it would be possible to pass the password automatically  But note this is of course a security problem as the password will be stored in plain text in that program

User · Answer

For security reasons you must avoid providing password on a command line otherwise anyone running ps command can see your password  Better to use sshpass utility like this      bin bash  export SSHPASS  your-password  sshpass -e ssh -oBatchMode no sshUser remoteHost   You might be interested in How to run the sftp command with a password from Bash script

[linux] Provide password to ssh command inside bash script, Without the usage of public keys and Expect

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