ssh-add —
adds RSA or DSA identities for the authentication agent
ssh-add |
[-lLdD] [file ...] |
ssh-add adds RSA or DSA identities to the authentication
agent, ssh-agent(1). When run without arguments, it adds the
file $HOME/.ssh/identity. Alternative 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.
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 represented by the
agent.
-d- Instead of adding the identity, removes the identity from the agent.
-D- Deletes all identities from the agent.
- $HOME/.ssh/identity
- Contains the 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 DSA authentication identity of the user.
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.)
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 created OpenSSH.
Markus Friedl contributed the support for SSH protocol versions 1.5 and 2.0.