# authorized\_keys and unique

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/authorized-keys-and-unique/13791>\
**Category:** Ansible Developer\
**Created:** [October 28, 2013, 5:04pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/authorized-keys-and-unique/13791 "2013-10-28T17:04:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![James\_Cammarata1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@James\_Cammarata1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/James_Cammarata1)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2013, 5:04pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/authorized-keys-and-unique/13791/1 "2013-10-28T17:04:51Z")

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I noticed today that commit 346d46a appears to have the unintended consequence of making all keys in an authorized\_keys file unique, since they are now indexed in a dictionary rather than an array. This makes the “unique” option completely unnecessary, and I’m considering removing it.

Does anyone have any use case where they would want the same key in an authorized\_keys file but with different options? Considering I merged 346d46a in 2 weeks ago and we have not had any reports of issues regarding uniqueness, I’m betting not many people were using non-unique keys as a feature.

Thoughts?