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Accepted
Adi Roiban
Asked: 2011-05-27 00:02:39 +0800 CST

How to use openssh sftp command with a RSA/DSA key specified from the command line

  • 772

The Openssh ssh and scp command provied an -i command line option to specify the path to the RSA/DSA key to be used for authentication.

Looking at the sftp man pages I was not able to find a way to specify the RSA/DSA key.

I am looking for a way to do initiate an sftp session that will use a specified RSA/DSA key, and not the ~/.ssh/id_{dsa,rsa} keys.

I tried OpenSSH sftp client on Linux...but it should have the same options on other platforms.

ssh sftp rsa dsa

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    One potential option is to use sftp -oIdentityFile=/path/to/private/keyfile. Need more info to say whether that will work for you. Seems to work under Mac/Linux.

    • 52

  2. You can simply use the -i argument for your sftp or ssh command.

    sftp -i /path/to/private/keyfile ...

    If the -i option is not available, you can use the -o option with a syntax like:

    sftp -oIdentityFile=/path/to/private/keyfile ...
    • 25

  3. You can create an alternate config file for the connection and use the -F switch to tell ssh to use it. create a config file e.g. ~/.ssh/config.sftp with the contents

    Host remote.host.tld
User RemoteUserName
IdentityFile /path/to/atlernate/identityfile

    then call sftp like so

    sftp -F ~/.ssh/config.sftp remote.host.tld
Connecting to remote.host.tld...
Enter passphrase for key '/path/to/atlernate/identityfile':
sftp>

    The config above restricts the use of the alternate key (when this config file is used) to user RemoteUserName on remote.host.tld.

    Have a look at the man page for ssh_confg for the usage of the alternate config file

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