how to mantain an “scp session” open?

Question

I massively use scp and ssh for work. I'm a little bored to insert the password everytime Usually I scp many files from term and I was wondering if there is a way to mantain open the scp connection. I mean, it would be great if there is something like this:

$ scp user@server # to estabilsh the connection
user@server's password:
$ scp file1 user@server:/folder # No password asked!
$ scp close # to close the connection

Answer 1

While it may be possible to keep the connection open, the best way of doing this is probably to use public key authentication, which avoids the need to repeatedly type a password.

Assuming both the local and remote machines are running linux:

user@local $ cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@remote 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

Will add the SSH key of the local machine to the list of pre-approved users of the remote machine, and subsequent ssh or scp commands should not require a password.

If you still get asked for a password, you might need to do

user@remote $ chmod 400 .ssh/authorized_keys