Created attachment 1780 [details]
[patch] Automatically add keys to ssh-agent(1)

[Continuing a mailing list thread; see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.openssh.devel/16422.]

My keys are secured with a passphrase. That's good for security, but having to type the passphrase either at every login or at every invocation of ssh(1) is annoying.

It's possible to hack around this annoyance, but such hacks are inevitably brittle. OpenSSH should just do quietly do the right thing, as it does in other cases.

Please find included a patch (against OpenBSD's OpenSSH) to fix this. By way of specification, I'll quote ssh_config(5):

     AddKeysToAgent
             Specifies whether keys should be automatically added to ssh-agent(5) (if running).  If this option is set to ``yes'' and a key is loaded from a file, this key and all keys with either the same or an empty passphrase are added to the agent (with the default lifetime), as if by ssh-add(1).  If this option is set to ``ask'', ssh will require confirmation using the SSH_ASKPASS pro- gram before adding a key (see ssh-add(1) for details).  If this option is set to ``confirm'', each use of the key must be confirmed, exactly as if the -c option was specified to ssh-add(1).  If this option is set to ``no'', no keys are added to the agent.  The argument must be ``yes'', ``confirm'', ``ask'', or ``no''.  The default is ``no''.

This is my first patch, so please review thoroughly! I'll happily make any changes requested.

		Joachim

P.S. This patch has been completely rewritten (relative to the patch posted to the mailing list, above) to support adding all keys with the same passphrase at once.