As a workaround you could try to make a copy of the ssh key and change its password using ssh-keygen -p -f keyfilename.

This is often what you want anyway, since the whole point of passphrase protected ssh keys is that if someone gets hold of your keyfile (such as if your notebook is stolen), they can't use it. This advantage is negated if you store the password on the same computer and supply it automatically from a script. That, of course, may not be what you want: maybe you want to query the password using some GUI, I can't tell.

Update: for both the original question (supplying the passphrase to ssh) and for changing the passphrase of the key programmatically, you could try setting the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable, as documented in the manual page ssh(1).

In reply to Re: passphrase on a RSA key with net::ssh::perl by ambrus
in thread passphrase on a RSA key with net::ssh::perl by manb

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