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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

The most magical command he didn't mention is 'ssh-copy-id'. If you can log-in to a host with password, you just 'ssh-copy-id myuser@thishost', supply the password once, and from that moment you can ssh with public key authentication. Extreme magic.

Also, sshfs works great, but has some issues with memory mapped files that silently lose writes. Luckily (?) most programs don't use mmap to write files, so it's not very noticeable.

All in all, ssh is one of the greatest tools.

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I'm always sad that OS X doesn't support ssh-copy-id natively.

Agreed, but that's easy enough to deal with:

`brew install ssh-copy-id`

man this was an awesome find for me. thank you.

Since it's basically just a bash-script you can just copy it from any of the major Linux-distros. I've copied mine from Debian Lenny, and it works great.

apparently it's in homebrew (see other comment), but for half an eternity, I've always been using this:

    ssh user@host "mkdir .ssh && cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

(remove the mkdir if .ssh already exists)

This works as well and is using nothing but the power of the unix shell and the concept of pipes.

Use mkdir -p to avoid failing if .ssh already exists.

    ssh user@host "mkdir -p .ssh && cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

My favorite idiom when dealing with new cloud servers is: ssh-copy-id user@host-ip <Paste random password> ssh !$

Saves copying/pasting the host ip a second time. Trivial Bash trick I know -- but it is a time saver...

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