.ssh directory not being created

Question

To generate the .ssh dir I use this command:

ssh-keygen

taken from this tutorial: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/Tutorials/Hadoop/05%20-

Answer 1

I am assuming that you have enough permissions to create this directory.

To fix your problem, you can either ssh to some other location:

ssh user@some.host

and accept new key - it will create directory ~/.ssh and known_hosts underneath, or simply create it manually using

mkdir ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh

Note that chmod 700 is an important step!

After that, ssh-keygen should work without complaints.