SSH and sudo

Following on from my blog Fun with SSH here's a way to run sudo and pass the password on the command line in a script.

First you need to get the password from the user or set the password in a variable.

read -s -p "Enter remote user password: " usrpwd

This prompts the user to enter the password, without echoing to the screen and stores it in $usrpwd.

Now we can ssh to the remote server and run a command via sudo.
Here I'm just running date but you can do anything.

ssh raspberrypi sudo -S <<< $usrpwd date

james@raspberrypi's password:
[sudo] password for james: Wed  6 Mar 15:44:44 GMT 2019

If you incorporate this with my previous blog on SSH you can automate the logging into a remote server and running scripts.

As with all of this stuff the easier you make it for yourself the easier it is for somebody else to destroy your servers.