28 Sep 2010
sshpass – a tool for non-interactively performing password authentication with SSH’s so called “interactive keyboard password authentication” – useful for automation scripts where you are unable to use ssh keys.
Of course using ssh keys plus an ssh-agent or ssh keychain (even for cron jobs) is more secure. But I’m working with a proprietary, linux based system where some pointy-headed-boss decided that it’s safer to disable key based authentication, because, well, I don’t know (because they don’t understand key based authentication?).
A work mate came across sshpass, and we use it by caching the password in an env variable. Slightly safer than the older version, where our expect scripts just pulled the password out of a file :-o
comments powered by Disqus