making the passphrase prompt more clear

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Aidan Feldman <aidan.feldman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am going to preface this email by saying that I know very little
> about OpenSSH internals, the protocol, etc.
>
> I do a lot of work with novice programmers, and one step that comes up
> relatively early is generating SSH keys.  In case you haven't done it
> in a while, the output looks like this:
>
> $ ssh-keygen -t rsa
> Generating public/private rsa key pair.
> Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/aidan/.ssh/id_rsa):
> Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
>
> When that last step comes up, I am regularly asked, "Does it mean the
> system password, or a new one?"  A slight tweak of the language could
> easily eliminate that confusion... something like "Enter passphrase
> for the new key" or "Enter new passphrase".
>
> I would happily submit the patch myself if it wouldn't take a few
> hours for me to figure out how to do so :-)  Thanks!

What a *sensible* person! Kudos to you for catching just the sort of
thing that irritates or confuses people, especially new users.

I'd suggest "Enter passphrase for key (empty for no passphrase)"