Shell Programming and Scripting

Somebody made a policy that 'we use sftp now instead of ftp'. I have recommended we use scp because I can't for the life of me think of a *good* reason to use sftp and not scp. But most of what I do is stupid stuff without a good reason. I get judged on how much I can just say yes, no matter how dumb it is.

The technology exists to do public/private keys, and we can do it *technically*, but explaining to the higher ups about keys and delaying the project long enough to convince/educate everyone that would need to be convinced/educated so that we can be allowed to set up public/private keys would cost me personally, no matter that it is not my fault.

The higher ups want to be able to check off the box on a form that says: we use sftp instead of ftp without any effort and without bothering anyone or changing anything about how we do stuff.

Since it is my job to do this, I want to be able to %s/ftp/sftp/g in the shell scripts and be done.

However this is not possible it turns out. sftp won't take a password in batch mode. Now I know all about setting up keys on servers to get passwordless login, but they aren't going to let me put my key on their server because they likely don't know WTF a key is and can't be bothered to learn. They've already given me the password, and shown that connecting manually with a password prompt works, and are not interested in the month of arguments and explaination and emails necessary to explain to everyone about keys.

In fact, if I could get keys installed, I wouldnt even use sftp in the scripts I'd use scp. This isn't going to happen. In need to pass a password in an automated fashion.

Is there any parameter or setting that I can pass sftp so that it will just take a password even though that is dumb? I live in a dumb world. I just want to be dumb and have it work.

Currently I use ftp -in. I want the equivalent of that for sftp. I tried sftp -b - but that doesn't accept a password.

Thanks.

sftp doesn't take passwords that way for all the same reasons ssh doesn't. About the only thing that might work to fake a typed in password convincingly enough is the 'expect' tool/language.