How to use the `security` command-line tool to add a keychain

command linekeychainssh

I'm doing some remote Mac administration and finding myself needing to copy a keychain to the machine and then add it to the default list of keychains.

Using VNC and the GUI, this is simple: just double-click it and Keychain Access opens, revealing that it's been added. But how do you do this via terminal over SSH, so that it can be scripted? The security tool doesn't seem to have an "add-keychain" command or an argument to any other command that would do this, as far as I can tell.

How do you do this?

Best Answer

For some reason, the feature is hidden in the form of the -s argument to list-keychains. The other gotcha is that you need to simultaneously re-add all existing keychains. This should take care of it:

security list-keychains -s `security list-keychains | xargs` [path to keychain you want to add]

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How to update iTunes Match from the command line

iTunes doesn't let you AppleScript this natively, but you can use some UI scripting to 'click' the menu bar item and do it for you:

tell application "iTunes" to activate
tell application "System Events"
    tell application process "iTunes"
        click menu item "Update iTunes Match" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Store" of menu bar 1
    end tell
end tell

You can use that via SSH:

osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'tell application process "iTunes"' -e 'click menu item "Update iTunes Match" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Store" of menu bar 1' -e 'end tell' -e 'end tell'

How to manually add ssh key to keychain

Try adding a new item in the keychain app by pressing the small + Button at the bottom. It should look like this.

Best Answer

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How to update iTunes Match from the command line

How to manually add ssh key to keychain

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