scp (secure copy) to ec2 instance without password

Question

I have an EC2 instance running (FreeBSD 9 AMI ami-8cce3fe5), and I can ssh into it using my amazon-created key file without password prompt, no problem.

However, when I want to copy a file to the instance using scp I am asked to enter a password:

scp somefile.txt -i mykey.pem [email protected]:/

Password:

Any ideas why this is happening/how it can be prevented?

Answer 1

This could be happening because of the wrong order of the arguments you used in the command to copy the file to your instance.

Try the following command:

scp -i mykey.pem somefile.txt [email protected]:/