getting a list of files from secure server

Question

i am trying to get a list of files from secure server to compare them (using diff) to the ones i modified on local version (unfortunately the company i work in is not using subversion nor git yet)

i get list of files easily with:

find . -mtime -20 | grep "\.php\|\.js\|\.css" > changedfiles.log

what i need is a script which would loop over this list and secure copy each of them (scp or rsync) to a local directory, preserving relative path name. i tried:

for line in `cat changedfiles.log`
do
 DIRPATH=`dirname "$line"`
 `mkdir -p myfiles/$DIRPATH`
 scp user@host:/remotepath/$line myfiles/$line
done

but scp keeps asking me for the password (i dont want to setup key-based authentication to scp without password)

i am not allowed to ssh on remote server so i cannot just zip the list and download them in one command

is it possible to do something to input password only once?

Answer 1

Rather than set up a passphraseless key, create a passphrase-protected key and use ssh-agent to ensure you only need to enter it once per job.

After generating your keys, prefix your script with something like this:

# Start a new agent
eval `ssh-agent -s`

# add keys with a two-hour time limit
ssh-add -t 7200 ~/.ssh/id_rsa

At this point, you'll be prompted for your passphrase. After your script is finished, you can have ssh-agent be killed automatically if you do not wish to let it continue to run:

# kill the agent
ssh-agent -k