Ytdyklly

According to the manual, there is an option -o password_stdin which might allow to read the password from standard input, which can probably be a redirection. I have never used it, so I'm speculating.

That said, I strongly advise against such a solution which is inherently insecure.

ssh works very well with a system of private/public keys. It is simple and secure. No need to enter a password or to write it in clear in a shell script. Just push your public key on the server and you can connect immediately.

-o password_stdin do not seem to be working on all systems, for instance freeBSD. etc.


You can also use expect Interpreter, it should work with sshfs
and should do the trick.


Another solution would be sshpass, for instance, let say your are backing up directory /var/www

Backing up:

name=$(date '+%y-%m-%d')

mkdir /backup/$name && tar -czvf /backup/$name/"$name.tar.gz" /var/www

uploading backup file to backup server

sshpass -p "your_password" scp -r backup_user@target_ip:/home/ /backup/$name

So it will upload directory with today's backup


But still, as it was said higher, best(safe and simple) way would be to use ssh key pair

The only inconvenience would be that you have to go through the key generation process once on every server you need to pair, but it is better than keeping a password in plain text format on all servers you want to back up :),

Generating a Key Pair the Proper way

• 
  

  On Local server

  
  
  

  ssh-keygen -t rsa
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  On remote Server

  
  
  

  ssh root@remote_servers_ip "mkdir -p .ssh"
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  Uploading Generated Public Keys to the Remote Server

  
  
  

  cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh root@remote_servers_ip "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  Set Permissions on Remote server

  
  
  

  ssh root@remote_servers_ip "chmod 700 ~/.ssh; chmod 640 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  Login

  
  
  

  ssh root@remote_servers_ip
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  Enabling SSH Protocol v2

  
  
  

  
  

  uncomment "Protocol 2" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  enabling public key authorization in sshd

  
  
  

  
  

  uncomment "PubkeyAuthentication yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

  
  

  
  


• 
  

  If StrictModes is set to yes in /etc/ssh/sshd_config then

  
  
  

  restorecon -Rv ~/.ssh
  
  

  
  

Piping the "sshfs password" with <<< to -o password_stdin works on bash:

sshfs -o password_stdin backup_user@target_ip:/home /mnt/backup <<< "sshfs password"

echo 'password' | sshfs user@host:/dir /mnt -o password_stdin

The "-o password_stdin" option is what enables you to pipe your password.

That said, keys are a better option, unless your service provider doesn't let you use them for sftp. (This is one of WP Engine's notable failures.)

one thing to keep in mind is that if you are using the -o password_stdin option, it might appear to not be working because sshfs will ask whether to connect to the host or not (if it is the first time you connect to it and it is not added to the known hosts file yet). If you are running it in a batch you will never see sshfs asking. Workarounds to avoid this are:

1. add the -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no option to sshfs
   or


2. run sshfs manually once to add the host to the known hosts file

Mount script:

#!/bin/bash

server=<host>

user=<username>

pass=<password>

root=<hostpath>

mount=$(pwd)/sshfs



type sshfs >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "sshfs required"; exit 1; }

type sshpass >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "sshpass required"; exit 1; }



mkdir -p $mount



SSHPASS="$pass" sshfs $server:$root $mount -o ssh_command="sshpass -e ssh -l $user"

Unmount:

#!/bin/bash



mount=$(pwd)/sshfs



fusermount -u $mount