Special Characters in Password (PuTTY)

[hiero]

hi there folks,

first of all i hope i got the right forum for my question. If not forgive me plz and accept my apology

My question regards PuTTy, or to be more concrete PsFTP.

TBH I dont even know if its a Unix - related question, a problem with PuTTY or a win command line failure...

I try to execute

psftp.exe -bc -be -b mybatch -v -P 22 -pw $***<§*** -2 -i PRIVATEKEYfile user'at'host

in the windows command line which throws the error: "The System cannot find the file specified"

If I remove the -pw Attribute everything works fine. (Though the manual entered password is not accepted... while i can connect via winscp without problems)

The problem is caused by the special characters in the password attribute, i tried already a lot like putting the password in single and double quotes, brackets etc without success. I asked google for escape sequences, too. but i didnt got any satisfying results.

Does anybody know a solution, without having to change the password?
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[Irithori]

I thought, password auth and key auth would exclude each other in putty/psftp.

Two thoughts:
1) giving the password on the commandline is a bad idea.
At least in unix, another user could see it by listing the processes.
I suspect, windows will be similar here.

2) key auth should a) be enough and b) you would be able to use pageant as a ssh-agent to hold the passphrase to that private key.


Case 2) is only viable, if you can live without a two factor authentication.
This here should help:
Using public keys for SSH authentication