Hi!

I'd love to use SSH keys, but I can't. Why? because I manage about 3000 servers (now you can see why this Perl script would be handy!) and about 30% of those use a shared home directory and my key is in $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys.
For some reason, the very first time I connect to the server, it asks me for a password. From then on, it works with the key.

That's not the only problem, there are other servers where my home directory is a symlink to somewhere on the filesystem and SSH refuses to read my key in that sort of scenario, so SSH keys don't work on these systems (and it's a lot of them!!). Only conclusion I came to is that SSH does not read your key if your home dir is a symlink, as I tried changing permissions all over the place and no luck.

I figured since some work, some don't, I'll just try and work with password prompts and be done with it.

It's probably worth saying that I don't have root on the 3000 servers, otherwise I could probably fix a lot of these issues I'm having with SSH keys.