Generation of private key using des3 gets stuck

Question

I'm following Heroku's documentation to generate a private key for an SSL certificate.

When I execute the command openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.pass.key 2048, I get the following result:

$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.pass.key 2048
Loading 'screen' into random state - done
Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus
..........................+++
..................................................+++

I can't get to the prompt where I'm supposed to enter the passphrase for the keys.

I don't understand why OpenSSL fails to complete. I've generated keys without triple DES, so I guess the error is in the encryption. How can I get this solved?

Answer 1

I saw this exact symptom in a Git for Windows shell. It might be that it gets stuck trying to ask for a password but can't. So as suggested here I added -passout pass:MyPassword and it worked.