Quickest Way: Using STDIN and Pipe to Copy SSH Public Key to Server

Goal

Copy SSH public key to another machine without using external tools such as ssh-copy-id - Only pure shell built-in or at least standard commands.

Solution

The solution is using shell STDIN and PIPE it to ssh.

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@hostname 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys -'

The quote for the ssh arguments is important because without it the redirection will goes to your local machine instead of remote machine. The "-" at the last of cat command on the remote indicate it reads the input from STDIN.

Reference

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/4830/easiest-way-to-copy-ssh-keys-to-another-machine

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