ssh-keygen

Generate ssh keys used for authentication, password-less logins, and other things.

More information.

• Generate a key interactively:

ssh-keygen

• Specify file in which to save the key:

ssh-keygen -f {~/.ssh/filename}

• Generate an ed25519 key with 100 key derivation function rounds:

ssh-keygen -t {ed25519} -a {100}

• Generate an RSA 4096-bit key with email as a comment:

ssh-keygen -t {dsa|ecdsa|ed25519|rsa} -b {4096} -C "{comment|email}"

• Remove the keys of a host from the known_hosts file (useful when a known host has a new key):

ssh-keygen -R {remote_host}

• Retrieve the fingerprint of a key in MD5 Hex:

ssh-keygen -l -E {md5} -f {~/.ssh/filename}

• Change the password of a key:

ssh-keygen -p -f {~/.ssh/filename}

• Change the type of the key format (for example from OPENSSH format to PEM), the file will be rewritten in-place:

ssh-keygen -p -N "" -m {PEM} -f {~/.ssh/OpenSSH_private_key}

Copyright © 2014—present the tldr-pages team and contributors.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

CC-BY