keychain和ssh-agent

keychain is definitely the easiest way to ensure that script works fine in crontab as well.

Since keychain is not included in most of Unix/Linux derivations, here is the step by step procedure.

1. Download the appropriate rpm package depending on your OS version from http://pkgs.repoforge.org/keychain/. Example for CentOS 6:

wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/keychain/keychain-2.7.0-1.el6.rf.noarch.rpm

2. Install the package:

sudo rpm -Uvh keychain-2.7.0-1.el6.rf.noarch.rpm

3. Generate keychain files for your SSH key, they will be located in ~/.keychain directory. Example for id_rsa:

keychain ~/.ssh/id_rsa

4. Add the following line to your script anywhere before the first command that is using SSH authentication:

source ~/.keychain/$HOSTNAME-sh

I personally tried to avoid to use additional programs for this, but everything else I tried didn't work. And this worked just fine.