ssh-copy-id with an alternative port

If you use ssh on a regular basis, you probably already know about setting up ssk-keys. If you dont know about ssh-keys, you should! - its worth reading up on.

ssh-copy-id is a helper script that will copy your public key across to the remote machine and append it to the authorized_keys file.

This is all well and good if the server is on port 22, but for non-standard ports, this script does not support a -p option.

Instead of copying across the key manually, I googled for workarounds and came across this post where the author explains that the arguments to ssh-copy-id are simply passed on to the ssh command.

This means by using quotes, everything inside of them will be passed straight through and that allows a command like this to achieve the desired result:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub '-p xxxx username@host'

Kudos to Mike Gerwitz for the tip.