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

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 :)

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

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?

Install sshpass, then launch the command:

sshpass -p "yourpassword" ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no yourusername@hostname