Today I run  ssh-copy-id  from a machine without any generated key (and without any key in ssh-agent) and it failed hard with weird results:

    /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: ERROR: failed to open ID file '/root/.pub': No such file or directory
	(to install the contents of '/root/.pub' anyway, look at the -f option)

It is caused by the false expectation, that there are some keys in ~/.ssh/ on the line 59:

    DEFAULT_PUB_ID_FILE="$HOME/$(cd "$HOME" ; ls -t .ssh/id*.pub 2>/dev/null | grep -v -- '-cert.pub$' | head -n 1)"

It sets

    + DEFAULT_PUB_ID_FILE=/root/

which passes the condition

    + '[' -r /root/ ']'

and the execution gets into the function   use_id_file()  unnoticed and fails to open file

    /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: line 87: /root/.pub: No such file or directory'

Checking also if the file is regular file should solve the issue. Failing earlier is probably not a good idea, because we can still use  ssh-agent  keys (remains working).


diff --git a/contrib/ssh-copy-id b/contrib/ssh-copy-id
index bef5c95..f750e70 100644
--- a/contrib/ssh-copy-id
+++ b/contrib/ssh-copy-id
@@ -189,7 +189,8 @@ SSH_OPTS="${SSH_OPTS:+$SSH_OPTS }'$(quote "$USER_HOST")'"
 # and populate "$@" for later use (only way to get proper quoting of options)
 eval set -- "$SSH_OPTS"
 
-if [ -z "$(eval $GET_ID)" ] && [ -r "${PUB_ID_FILE:=$DEFAULT_PUB_ID_FILE}" ] ; then
+if [ -z "$(eval $GET_ID)" ] && [ -r "${PUB_ID_FILE:=$DEFAULT_PUB_ID_FILE}" ] \
+    && [ -f "$PUB_ID_FILE" ] ; then
   use_id_file "$PUB_ID_FILE"
 fi