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Emanuil Rusev
Asked: 2016-01-22 09:57:40 +0800 CST

Does known_hosts support comments?

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I find the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file a bit hard to read.

It'd help if I could add comments to it so I thought I should ask if that's possible.

ssh

2 Answers

  1. Yes. As the manual page for sshd notes:

    Each line in these files contains the following fields: markers (optional), hostnames, bits, exponent, modulus, comment. The fields are separated by spaces.

    [...] The optional comment field continues to the end of the line, and is not used.

    Lines starting with ‘#’ and empty lines are ignored as comments.

    This means that you can create comments in two ways:

    # Comments allowed at start of line
closenet,...,192.0.2.53 1024 37 159...93 closenet.example.net

    The whole first line is comment and the closenet.example.net is also comment

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  2. not sure if this solves the problem, but you can alias the IP in your .ssh/config file with something like this 

    Host rememberme
    HostName 100.110.120.130
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