Removing a Single Line from known_hosts With sed

Posted on in System Administration

cover image for article

Ever so often, something changes on the network, and you find that your .ssh/known_hosts file has gotten out of date. Usually this happens after an upgrade or device change. You'll get the rather ominous warning that REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!

If you are confident that someone isn't doing something nasty and the RSA key fingerprint on the other side has legitimately changed, you can safely remove the offending key and the new key will be added the next time you connect. Fortunately, this is easily done with a sed one-liner:

sed -i -e '185d' .ssh/known_hosts

In this case, '185' is the line number that was reported as containing the offending key.

My Bookshelf

Reading Now

Other Stuff