A shell script that autoloads the ssh-agent and keys into each terminal session of a workstation, significantly reducing the complexity of using ssh-agent.

Used and tested on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux computers. Should work on any UNIXy host with OpenSSH installed.

curl -L -o ~/.ssh/agent.sh https://github.com/msimerson/ssh-agent/raw/master/agent.sh
chmod 755 ~/.ssh/agent.sh

echo 'source .ssh/agent.sh' >> ~/.bash\_profile

echo '.ssh/agent.sh' >> ~/.zprofile

Setting _sockfile is an efficiency improvement. Rather than storing the ssh socket file in /tmp/ssh-XXXXXXXXXX/agent. and having to glob to find it, we can store it in a fixed location so this script can find it more efficiently. Since all our shell/terminal windows will share the first ssh-agent process, there is no need for the random location.

If you decide to alter the location, keep security in mind. You do not want others to have access to this socket. Your ~/.ssh directory is a great choice because its default permissions (600) are readable only by you.

If you wish to keep the default /tmp behavior, comment out the _sockfile setting.