How to pass password to scp?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50096

Question

I know it is not recommended, but is it at all possible to pass the user's password to scp?

I'd like to copy a file via scp as part of a batch job and the receiving server does, of course, need a password and, no, I cannot easily change that to key-based authentication.

Was it helpful?

Solution

You can script it with a tool like expect (there are handy bindings too, like Pexpect for Python).

OTHER TIPS

Use sshpass:

sshpass -p "password" scp -r user@example.com:/some/remote/path /some/local/path

or so the password does not show in the bash history

sshpass -f "/path/to/passwordfile" scp -r user@example.com:/some/remote/path /some/local/path

The above copies contents of path from the remote host to your local.

Install :

  • ubuntu/debian
    • apt install sshpass
  • centos/fedora
    • yum install sshpass
  • mac w/ macports
    • port install sshpass
  • mac w/ brew
    • brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kadwanev/bigboybrew/master‌​/Library/Formula/ssh‌​pass.rb

just generate a ssh key like:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@youremail.com"

copy the content of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and lastly add it to the remote machines ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

make sure remote machine have the permissions 0700 for ~./ssh folder and 0600 for ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

If you are connecting to the server from Windows, the Putty version of scp ("pscp") lets you pass the password with the -pw parameter.

This is mentioned in the documentation here.

You can use the 'expect' script on unix/terminal

For example create 'test.exp' :

#!/usr/bin/expect
        spawn scp  /usr/bin/file.txt root@<ServerLocation>:/home
        set pass "Your_Password"
        expect {
        password: {send "$pass\r"; exp_continue}
                  }

run the script 

expect test.exp

I hope that helps.

curl can be used as a alternative to scp to copy a file and it supports a password on the commandline. 

curl --insecure --user username:password -T /path/to/sourcefile sftp://desthost/path/

Here is an example of how you do it with expect tool:

sub copyover {
    $scp=Expect->spawn("/usr/bin/scp ${srcpath}/$file $who:${destpath}
+/$file");
    $scp->expect(30,"ssword: ") || die "Never got password prompt from
+ $dest:$!\n";
    print $scp 'password' . "\n";
    $scp->expect(30,"-re",'$\s') || die "Never got prompt from parent 
+system:$!\n";
    $scp->soft_close();
    return;
}

Nobody mentioned it, but Putty scp (pscp) has a -pw option for password.

Documentation can be found here: https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.67/htmldoc/Chapter5.html#pscp

  1. make sure you have "expect" tool before, if not, do it

    # apt-get install expect

  2. create the a script file with following content. (# vi /root/scriptfile)

    spawn scp /path_from/file_name user_name_here@to_host_name:/path_to

    expect "password:"

    send put_password_here\n;

    interact

  3. execute the script file with "expect" tool

    # expect /root/scriptfile

Once you set up ssh-keygen as explained above, you can do

scp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa /local/path/to/file remote@ip.com:/path/in/remote/server/

If you want to lessen typing each time, you can modify your .bash_profile file and put

alias remote_scp='scp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa /local/path/to/file remote@ip.com:/path/in/remote/server/

Then from your terminal do source ~/.bash_profile. Afterwards if you type remote_scp in your terminal it should run the scp command without password.

You may use ssh-copy-id to add ssh key:

$which ssh-copy-id #check whether it exists

If exists:

ssh-copy-id  "user@remote-system"

An alternative would be add the public half of the user's key to the authorized-keys file on the target system. On the system you are initiating the transfer from, you can run an ssh-agent daemon and add the private half of the key to the agent. The batch job can then be configured to use the agent to get the private key, rather than prompting for the key's password.

This should be do-able on either a UNIX/Linux system or on Windows platform using pageant and pscp.

steps to get sshpass For rhel/centos 6 : 

# wget http://epel.mirror.net.in/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# yum install sshpass

source: https://community.mapr.com/thread/9040

I found this really helpful answer here.

rsync -r -v --progress -e ssh user@remote-system:/address/to/remote/file /home/user/

Not only you can pass there the password, but also it will show the progress bar when copying. Really awesome.

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