All,

I have a script i need to sftp to anoother server, and sftp is the only thing i can use. Im to script username and password but still keep getting prompted for the password. Can someone tell me what needs to be changed?

Thanks!

#!/bin/sh

HOST='IP of dest svr'
USER='userid'
PASSWD='passwd'

sftp ${HOST} << EOF
user {$USER} {$PASSWD}
lcd /home/userid
put test.txt
exit

According to the sftp manpage (http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/remoteaccess/man/sftp.html), there is no user interactive command. You will need to find another way to enter the password.

It's probably using PAM to get the password, which tends to read its input directly from the terminal bypassing the standard input stream, so tricks like "echo $PASS | sftp ..." won't work. You could fool it by messing around with pseudo-ttys, but I've always found them rather hard to work with.

A much easier solution would be to set up public key authentication, as described here: http://sial.org/howto/openssh/publickey-auth/ (nb: the sftp program actually uses ssh as its transport layer, hence the talk of ssh in the howto).

But in order for this to work, doesn't sshd_config on the remote server have to have a option set to allow for passwordless authentification? I on the server im trying to run sftp from i did "ssh-keyget -t rsa and dsa" and cat'ted them into an authorized_keys file on the server and then scp'd that auth_keys file to the remote server and then tried to sftp the file over i am trying to transfer and still got prompted for the password.

So is my mistake in how i generated the keys and moved the auth_keys file to the remote server or is it the option in sshd_config? If its the sshd_config file then im SOL cause i dont have access to it because it isnt my server and its locked down like a drum.

Thanks for responding so quickly!

Well, you shouldn't really put usernames/passwds in scripts, as this is a definite security risk.
That being said, you can use the 'expect' utility to automate the passwd handling.
Possibly also look at ssh-agent : http://mah.everybody.org/docs/ssh

Yea i know i shouldnt but this is at the clients request because it is a pretty harmless server so if it did get hacked, no biggie. So anyone know how to get around the usernam and passwd issue with sftp?

Thanks

authorised keys ?

Read my post just above your first post, i mentioned that already. Not working.