I also use this a lot and would be interested in a solution to this.
To my knowledge it requires the password when invoked initially to
decrypt the private key.
There seems to be every option except that one you've asked for.
Alternatives could be to lock and unlock your agent to prevent
unattended logins, but this is nearly as much hassle as not using the
agent at all and manually entering the password to decrypt the private
on every use...
Or to require a lifetime on the key loaded, but again, not 100% convenient.
If anyone knows an answer to this, I'd also like to change my agent
behaviour to this... I suspect that the software does not support such a
feature at this time...
As a workaround, you could function off all ssh calls to invoke the
agent, check if it has your key and if not, then source it, asking you
for the password one time, and then retaining it and using it for every
future connection. Now I think about this, it's very easy to do in Bash....
-h
Hari Sekhon
Christopher Key wrote:
Hello,
Is there any way to invoke ssh-add so that it defers asking for the
passphase for my private key until the key is actually required. It
seems like such an obvious option to have; it would permit me to have
"eval $(ssh-agent) && ssh-add" in my .shrc, but not encumber me with
having to enter a passhrase every time I ssh in, nor would it prevent
unnattended logins. Am I missing something obvious in the way the
system is meant to work? Am I just being lazy in not wanting to run
ssh-add before the first time I use ssh?
This question applies to two versions,
OpenSSH_4.4p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8d 28 Sep 2006
OpenSSH_4.5p1 FreeBSD-20061110, OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004
