Hi again everyone. In my continuing quest to automate absolutely everything about rebuilding one of my computers, I'm writing a script that will generate a key relationship between it and my laptop (which I use for remote backup sometimes). I'm able to create the public and private keys without problems, but when it gets to adding the public key to the laptop ("scarlet"), I run into an issue. I don't want to just copy the public key into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 on scarlet, because from an aesthetic point of view, and a portability point of view, that's just nasty. If authorized_keys2 exists already, I'll overwrite it and cause myself pain. So, I instead copy the public key into my home dir on scarlet (scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub bnonn(a)scarlet:~/) However, I then want to append the contents of this key to the authorized_keys2 file in ~/.ssh/ on scarlet. Seems to me that the best way to do this is to simply cat it, since this will create the file if it doesn't already exist. I'm using the following command: ssh bnonn(a)scarlet cat ~/id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 This, however, appears to have no effect at all. It doesn't return an error; it just quietly does nothing. Again, I apologize if this is again an example of my fundamental dimness, but any help would be appreciated. Regards, Bnonn