Command-Line SSH – Copy SSH Public Key to Clipboard Without Newline

command linessh

Every Google search for copying a Mac's SSH Public Key to clipboard yields the following command, which results in a newline appended:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

This is undesirable as I need to paste a Public Key into a variable in an application I'm developing. In the hopes of saving folks the trouble of solving the same problem, I'll post my solution to this question in the answers section-

Best Answer

To copy your SSH Public Key cleanly to clipboard WITHOUT a trailing newline use

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy

or (without cat)

tr -d '\n' < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy

Related Solutions

How to Associate SSH Public Key with User Account

First, you create a public and private key (if you haven't done so already) on the machine from which you want to login:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

You only need to do this if there isn't already a ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file.

On Linux, there's the ssh-copy-id helper. On Mac, you need to copy the public key by hand:

Copy the generated public key to the target machine:

scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@targetmachine:myPublicKey.pub
Login to the target machine:

ssh user@targetmachine
Append the public key to the authorized keys:

cat myPublicKey.pub >>.ssh/authorized_keys
You can now delete the copied key:

rm myPublicKey.pub
Done. You should now be able to login to your target machine without the need to enter a password.

MacOS – How to add a guest public ssh key for remote access

Have them give you their public key, e. g. id_rsa.pub. Add that to the end of your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file (e.g. by running cat id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in Terminal).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to Associate SSH Public Key with User Account

MacOS – How to add a guest public ssh key for remote access

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