Specify password to sftp in a Bash script

bash sftp remote-backup .netrc
Eli picture Eli · Mar 11, 2011 · Viewed 55.6k times · Source

I am trying to write a script to back up a file over SFTP. The problem is, it requires a password, and I see no way to manually specify a password to SFTP. I've heard about requiring no password by using public keys, but that requires being able to ssh into the remote server and modify some configuration files, which I cannot do.

Currently my solution is to use cURL, but that is insecure (uses normal FTP). I also looked at the .netrc file, but that seems to be for FTP instead of SFTP. How do I manually specify a password for sftp?

Answer

Ilya Kharlamov picture Ilya Kharlamov · Apr 30, 2012

Lftp allows specifying passwords for both ftp and sftp and does not require public keys at all. Your sh sync script may look like this:

#!/bin/sh
# Define folders
THEFOLDER='/mnt/my/folder'
# List files
THEFILES=`ls -p $THEFOLDER | grep -v "/"`

for file in $THEFILES
do
  echo "Processing $file"
  lftp -u login,password -e "put $THEFOLDER/$file;quit"  theftp/sub/folder
done

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