Is there an equivalent to ssh-copy-id for Windows?

Question

Is there any equivalent or port of ssh-copy-id available for Windows? That is, is there an easy way to transfer SSH keys from a local machine to a remote server under Windows?

In case it helps, I'm using Pageant and Kitty (a Putty alternative) already.

Answer 1

ssh-copy-id is a pretty simple script that should be pretty easy to replicate under windows.

If you ignore all the parameter handling, error handling, and so on, these are the two commands from ssh-copy-id that are actually doing the work most of the time.

GET_ID="cat ${ID_FILE}"
{ eval "$GET_ID" ; } | ssh ${1%:} "umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" || exit 1

Using the putty tools a command like this should be equivalent (not tested).

type  public_id | plink.exe username@hostname "umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys"

If you want to do all the same error handling, and the automatic key location, I am sure writing a script under Windows will be a lot trickier, but certainly possible.

Answer 2

ssh-copy-id does a couple of things (read the man page for details), but the most important thing it does is append the contents of your local public key file to a remote file called authorized_keys.

• You could do this yourself by opening the key file with a text editor and pasting the contents in the Kitty terminal.
  echo 'long_line_with_contents_of_public_key_file' >> .ssh/authorized_keys

• Alternatively, you could upload the file using WinSCP (which uses sftp, or scp as a fallback) and do something similar to my previous suggestion, without the ugly copy/pasting.
  cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
  where id_rsa.pub is the filename of the public key you uploaded.

Answer 3

you dont need to alternative for ssh-copy-id because you needit in linux so just write it there and get the results.