Openssl: cat: /dev/fd/63: No such file or directory

I try to create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) using

openssl req -new -sha256 -key domain.key -subj "/" \ -reqexts SAN -config <(cat /System/Library/OpenSSL/openssl.cnf \ <(printf "[SAN]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:foo.com,DNS:"))

but getting the following error message on my macbook

cat: /dev/fd/63: No such file or directory

unknown option -reqexts

Any ideas?

4 Answers

Your command is probably copy&paste of a multi-line command where backslashes are used to join lines, however you somehow managed to get newlines converted to spaces.

Remove all occurences of "backslash + space".

I came across this question and in my case I did not have any \ , but I was using sudo so I had to use sudo su -c

$ sudo su -c 'openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /etc/ssl/private/nginx-blah.blah.com.key -new -out /etc/ssl/certs/nginx-blah.blah.com.crt -subj "/O=" -reqexts SAN -extensions SAN -config <(cat /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf <(printf "[SAN]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:blah.blah.com,IP:192.168.174.128")) -sha256' 

In some cases not mounted devpts can lead to the same error print. So needed to do: mount -t devpts devpts /dev/pts

/dev/fd is not an ordinary directory. In some case changing the user to root the rerunning the program could solve the problem.