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 acce

Answer 1

If you are using Windows PowerShell, the easiest way is to:

cat ~/.ssh/id_.pub | clip

That will copy the key to your clipboard for easy pasting.

So, in my instance, I use ed25519 since RSA is now fairly hackable:

cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub | clip

---

Because I find myself doing this a lot, I created a function and set a simple alias I could remember in my PowerShell profile (learn more about PowerShell profiles here. Just add this to your Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1:

function Copy-SSHKey {
    Get-Content ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub | clip
}

Set_Alias -Name sshkey -Value Copy-SSHKey

Then, in a PowerShell console, run . $profile to load the functions. Then from now on all you will need to do is run sshkey, and then paste the key into wherever you need via the clipboard.