How do I access my SSH public key?

Question

I've just generated my RSA key pair, and I wanted to add that key to GitHub.

I tried cd id_rsa.pub and id_rsa.pub, but no luck. How can I access my SSH public key?

Answer 1

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub or cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

You can list all the public keys you have by doing:

$ ls ~/.ssh/*.pub

Answer 2

Copy the key to your clipboard.

$ pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub # Copies the contents of the id_rsa.pub file to your clipboard 

Warning: it's important to copy the key exactly without adding newlines or whitespace. Thankfully the pbcopy command makes it easy to perform this setup perfectly.

and paste it wherever you need.

More details on the process, check: Generating SSH Keys.

Answer 3

Mac, Ubuntu, Linux compatible machines, use this command to print public key, then copy it:

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Answer 4

If you're using windows, the command is:

type %userprofile%\.ssh\id_rsa.pub

it should print the key (if you have one). You should copy the entire result. If none is present, then do:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]" -b 4096