Copyright (c) 1999 Philip Hands Computing <http://www.hands.com/> Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be included in translations approved by the Free Software Foundation instead of in the original English. .. ssh-copy-id - install your identity.pub in a remote machine's authorized_keys ssh-copy-id [-i [identity_file]] "[user@]machine"

ssh-copy-id is a script that uses ssh to log into a remote machine (presumably using a login password, so password authentication should be enabled, unless you've done some clever use of multiple identities)

It also changes the permissions of the remote user's home, ~/.ssh , and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to remove group writability (which would otherwise prevent you from logging in, if the remote sshd has StrictModes set in its configuration).

If the -i option is given then the identity file (defaults to ~/.ssh/identity.pub ) is used, regardless of whether there are any keys in your ssh-agent . Otherwise, if this:

" ssh-add -L"

provides any output, it uses that in preference to the identity file.

If the -i option is used, or the ssh-add produced no output, then it uses the contents of the identity file. Once it has one or more fingerprints (by whatever means) it uses ssh to append them to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the remote machine (creating the file, and directory, if necessary)

ssh (1), ssh-agent (1), sshd (8)