CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsshsubprocess
Rohit
Rohit

Reputation: 4178

subprocess.Popen keeps on asking password for ssh-copy-id command

I have gone through multiple threads which has similar questions (Use subprocess to send a password) and have tried number of things but still i am not able to get it to work. Basically i want to push my ssh-keys to a bunch of machines and i am trying to do that with subprocess. But somehow subprocess.Popen fails to get the password and hence it gets stuck.

Below are some of things I have tried.

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

p = Popen(['ssh-copy-id', 'testbox1'], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE).communicate(input=b'mypassword')

I have also tried supplying the password by writing to process's stdin channel like below

p.stdin.write(b'mypassword')
p.stdin.flush()

I have tried this in both python 2.7 and python and it didn't work. I have also tried providing a linefeed as well after the password but even that didn't work. I am not sure what i am missing here.

I know people have suggested to use Pexpect for this but then again i am more keen in knowing why subprocess can't handle this.

I know there are multiple libraries like Paramiko and also fabric which handles remote connections with much ease, but i don't think that can be used in this case as i am not directly sshing to a machine and rather using ssh-copy-id command from my local machine

Upvotes: 1

Views: 703

Answers (1)

Rohit
Rohit

Reputation: 4178

It seemed it was way to tricky to be handled with subprocess and hence i had to pexpect to solve this and it worked in first go.

import pexpect
from getpass import getpass

pwd = getpass("password: ")

child = pexpect.spawn('ssh-copy-id testbox1')
child.expect('.*ssword.*:')
child.sendline(pwd)
child.expect(pexpect.EOF, timeout=None)
cmd_show_data = child.before
cmd_output = cmd_show_data.split('\r\n')
for data in cmd_output:
    print data

Upvotes: 1

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