RE: [ITP] win-ssh-agent 1.07

["Thrall, Bryan" <bryan.thrall@flightsafety.com>]

Corinna Vinschen wrote on 2011-11-04: 
> On Nov  4 15:37, Nayuta Taga wrote:
>> 2011/11/4 Christopher Faylor
>>> On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 09:52:20AM -0400, Andrew Schulman wrote:
>>>>> I'd like to package and maintain win-ssh-agent for Cygwin. With the
>>>>> win-ssh-agent, we can use the ssh-agent (available inthe cygwin
>>>>> openssh) in the more smart way. Normally, we need to start all
>>>>> relevant programs, which mightneed to use the ssh, as child
>>>>> processes of the shell(e.g. bash) in which you eval'ed the
>>>>> ssh-agent. ?Because, theprograms must be able to refer to
>>>>> environment variables thatset by the ssh-agent. The win-ssh-agent
>>>>> enables all programs to refer to theenvironment variables of the
>>>>> ssh-agent, i.e. theSSH_AUTH_SOCK. ?Now, we no longer need to start
>>>>> programs aschild processes of the shell.
>>>> 
>>>> +1 Sounds useful.
>>> 
>>> I don't agree. ?I don't see why this couldn't be accomplished using
>>> standard UNIX tools
>> 
>> The win-ssh-agent is for applications that uses the cygwin openssh
>> internally and are executed from the Explorer (i.e. via the
>> ShellExecute() API).
>> 
>> The keychain in the distribution cannot propagate SSH_AUTH_SOCK to
>> them.
> 
> You can eaily propagate the SSH_* environment variables to other
> sessions via scripting, if you store the variables in a known path.
> You don't have to change the registry for that to work.

keychain stores the ssh-agent environment variables in $HOME/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh by default. I start keychain from my .bash_profile and then source $HOME/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh in my .bashrc so all my shells get the right values even if they aren't spawned from the shell that started keychain.

Hope this helps.
--
Bryan Thrall
Principal Software Engineer
FlightSafety International
bryan.thrall@flightsafety.com