ssh-add

 


 SSH-ADD(1)              System General Commands Manual              SSH-ADD(1)
 


NAME

ssh-add - adds RSA or DSA identities for the authentication agent

SYNOPSIS

ssh-add [-lLdD] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

ssh-add adds RSA or DSA identities to the authentication agent, ssh-agent(1). When run without arguments, it adds the files $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa, $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa, and $HOME/.ssh/identity. Alterna­ tive file names can be given on the command line. If any file requires a passphrase, ssh-add asks for the passphrase from the user. The Passphrase it is read from the user's tty. ssh-add retries the last passphrase if multiple identity files are given. The authentication agent must be running and must be an ancestor of the current process for ssh-add to work. The options are as follows: -l Lists fingerprints of all identities currently represented by the agent. -L Lists public key parameters of all identities currently repre­ sented by the agent. -d Instead of adding the identity, removes the identity from the agent. -D Deletes all identities from the agent.

FILES

$HOME/.ssh/identity Contains the protocol version 1 RSA authentication identity of the user. This file should not be readable by anyone but the user. Note that ssh-add ignores this file if it is accessible by others. It is possible to specify a passphrase when generating the key; that passphrase will be used to encrypt the private part of this file. This is the default file added by ssh-add when no other files have been specified. $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa Contains the protocol version 2 DSA authentication identity of the user. $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa Contains the protocol version 2 RSA authentication identity of the user. ENVIRONMENT DISPLAY and SSH_ASKPASS If ssh-add needs a passphrase, it will read the passphrase from the current terminal if it was run from a terminal. If ssh-add does not have a terminal associated with it but DISPLAY and SSH_ASKPASS are set, it will execute the program specified by SSH_ASKPASS and open an X11 window to read the passphrase. This is particularly useful when calling ssh-add from a .Xsession or related script. (Note that on some machines it may be necessary to redirect the input from /dev/null to make this work.) AUTHORS OpenSSH is a derivative of the original and free ssh 1.2.12 release by Tatu Ylonen. Aaron Campbell, Bob Beck, Markus Friedl, Niels Provos, Theo de Raadt and Dug Song removed many bugs, re-added newer features and cre­ ated OpenSSH. Markus Friedl contributed the support for SSH protocol versions 1.5 and 2.0.

SEE ALSO

ssh(1), ssh-agent(1), ssh-keygen(1), sshd(8) BSD September 25, 1999 BSD