Using a variable's value as password for scp, ssh etc. instead of prompting for user input every time

Question

AFAIK, the commands ssh or scp do not have/take a password parameter. Otherwise I could keep the password in a shell variable and probably get rid

Answer 1

Today, the only way I was able to do this in a bash script via crontab was like that:

eval $(keychain --eval --agents ssh id_rsa id_dsa id_ed25519)
source $HOME/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh

This is with the ssh agent already running and to achieve that it was needed the passphrase.