Shell Programming and Scripting

I have been tasked with scripting a sftp transfer from my clients sftp server to a vendor. I have been given a user name and password. This is an older OEL server, 5.2. I am not able to install any packages on this system. It does not have expect, ssh-pass, or any other ssh password helper installed. I have been told that the vendor we are sending the file to does not use private/public key authentication. I KNOW that it is not a secure method of transferring files, however, I need to script an sftp transfer, using a password, without expect, lftp, or other packages. I am stuck with sftp or scp. the files that are being transferred are also in a common directory, so rsync also seems to be out as well. Really stuck here. Any suggestions would be great. beating the client or vendor for stupidity are out of the question. I have combed this forum for almost 8 hours looking for any answer.

Thanks

Went on this same hunt more than a year ago.
We chose to not pursue this because of it's lack of security.
The only option I came up with was using the perl module Net-SFTP-Foreign.

ernie, thanks for the reply. glad I am not just crazy. going to have to try and talk the customer out of this madness than.

Can you not generate an SSH key pair and send them the public key? That you give you password-less login.


Robin

rbatte1, I would love to use that solution, only the vendor I am working with does NOT support rsa/dsa key pair log in. funny though, they do not support ftp either. So they are forcing their client to manually upload their files, or go through HUGE hurdles to script an automated file transfer.

Thanks, Craig

How do you know they don't support it? Have you tried uploading your public key to the remote machine?

achenle, I know they don't support it because I have tried to upload my key, both copying it directly, and pushing the key up. Neither worked. I have also spoken the the admin of the sftp site, and he confirmed that it was now supported at this time. I don't have rights to write to the jailed root directory of my user, so am unable to create the .ssh dir, and place the authorized_key file within.

Currently, we have it as a daily task for an admin to double click a script, enter the password and let it run. a royal pain, but I haven't found another solution. I have even tried to script in powershell, and push it through our ftp server, no joy.