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I want to use a shell script to pull a file from another server. I have written a script where i can do this but i want the script to work non-interactively so that it doesn't prompt me for the password and works automatically if i hard-code the same and let the script have what it needs.

I have done this before for FTP however, in out new servers the FTP connections are blocked and we can use only SCP or SFTP. My earlier script was something like this which used to work with FTP and did the job well without asking for the password:

#!/bin/bash -vx ftp -in 100.XXX.XXX.XX<<END_SCRIPT quote USER username quote PASS password bin prompt off cd /directory/in/remote/host lcd /directory/in/local/machine mget * bye END_SCRIPT

I tried the similar for SFTP in a script and it works for Interactive mode but like FTP i am not able to use the non-interactive options for SFTP. Following is my code to fetch particular files from the remote machine:

#!/bin/bash -vx path="/tmp/testanks" sftp [email protected] <<EOT cd $path get Bharti* quit EOT

How can i change the above code in a way that i could provide this script the username and password to make it non-interactive.

I understand that providing a hard-coded password is a security concern but right now i am concerned more about fetching the files immediately. I would really appreciate if i could get the secured ways of doing it as well along with the answer i desire.

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2 Answers 2

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With curl:

curl sftp://example.com/file.zip -u user:password

Note that for that public-key Authentication is preferred to using a password:

curl sftp://example.com/file.zip -u user

This will attempt to use ~/.ssh/id_rsa as a private key. You can specify another one with --key.

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the solution is to use scp, you add local's public key to the end of remote authorized_keys file.

then

 scp [email protected]:Bharthi/* $path

on local host, look in .ssh dir, if you don't have any .pub, do the following first (and only one time)

ssh-keygen (1) scp-copy-id [email protected] (2)
  1. accept all default, DO NOT enter a passwd when prompt
  2. enter password for username @ 100.X.X.X
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  • +1 as a side note scp has issues on multiple big files or huge number of small files, in which case you could use rsync, however you'll need rsync on both machines where scp only needs to be on machine running the script. Commented Jul 31, 2015 at 8:11
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    It seems like the server can block scp and enforces sftp. I tried to use scp and got this message: This service allows sftp connections only.. I remember, that this may be due to a chrooted environment which only works with sftp, not scp. (To be confirmed). Commented Feb 4, 2017 at 11:05
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    My server won't let me use scp. is there a solution for using only the sftp client? Commented Aug 24, 2017 at 17:18
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    SFTP does not require shell login, scp and rsync do. Keep this in mind. Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 8:41
  • If you're SFTP host has disabled non-interactive access (rendering scp useless), you can get around this by sending the commands from standard input as answered in another question here. Commented Oct 31, 2019 at 4:02

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