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I launched ssh-keygen, answered all questions and it reported that keys were successfully generated, but files are empty. Why?

~ > ssh-keygen -C "my key to github"
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/zubba/.ssh/id_rsa): id_github
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in id_github.
Your public key has been saved in id_github.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
83:73:78:8b:bb:dc:bb:a8:d7:b0:b0:fa:51:30:fd:55 my key to github
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|            E    |
|     .     .     |
|    o .   .      |
|     o + .       |
|      = S        |
|    ...= o       |
|    .o.+.        |
|    .oo+.        |
|  .ooo=.+o       |
~ > ls -l .ssh
итого 8,0K
-rw------- 1 zubba zubba 399 2012-01-10 18:56 authorized_keys
-rw------- 1 zubba zubba   0 2012-01-18 20:28 id_github
-rw-r--r-- 1 zubba zubba   0 2012-01-18 20:28 id_github.pub
~ >
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Are you looking at the right files? If that is unedited output then id_github should be in the current directory you ran ssh-keygen from, not in an .ssh sub-directory. –  Caesium Jan 18 '12 at 16:41
Sorry, yes, I ran ssh-keygen in $HOME, but checked files in $HOME/.ssh These files left from my previous attempt, when I entered key faile name as .ssh/id_github. I checked $HOME for id_github* files and found them zero lenght again. –  zuba Jan 18 '12 at 22:26
Finally I found a reason why they were generated of 0 lenght. There were background process which consumed all the free space at /home partition by the time I tried to generate keys, so ssh-keygen could not write files content. I wonder why it didn't complain for that? –  zuba Jan 18 '12 at 22:30
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1 Answer

You started ssh-keygen in $HOME. The files get created there:

ls -ltr ~/id_github*

I guess the files in .ssh/ are old ones?

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Yes, you're right. But those ~/id_github* files were empty as well. –  zuba Jan 18 '12 at 22:31
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