Automating SFTP in Bash with password?

arashi256 · 07-13-2010, 05:13 AM

Hi,

I wrote a script ages ago to automate an FTP transfer. This was easy as within the script you can specify the password with password <whatever>. Now I am wanting to do a similar thing with SFTP (SSH). I know that SFTP works differently and I cannot specify the password within the script - what do I need to do on the server I am connecting to to either "trust" the host I am connecting from or to somehow specify the password for "sftp user@some_host"? It's IP address will always be the same.

Thanks for any advice.

tredegar · 07-13-2010, 05:51 AM

sftp uses ssh
see man sftp

So you could set up private/public key-based authentication without a password, and it'll work.

Some howtos:
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...d_File_Copying
http://sial.org/howto/openssh/publickey-auth/

You could also look at scp

schneidz · 07-13-2010, 10:44 AM

one other note is that scp is useful for automation whereas sftp is useful when human intervention is necessary for entering prompts.

arashi256 · 07-14-2010, 03:56 AM

I would use SSH public key encryption, but the machine I want to connect from only has a DHCP-assigned IP address and the gateway address (where the connection would appear from) will change periodically. So unless I have a host with a static IP address, I don't seem to be able to use SSH public key encryption. I think I'll have to use AutoExpect/Expect instead, unless anyone has any better ideas.

schneidz · 07-14-2010, 07:35 AM

^ maybe dyndns will help ?