Lazy ssh-add

An entry from 2015-11-10 in the Journal.

Like most people I used to run ssh-add(1) to add keys to the authentication agent from my shell rc file. I got tired of unlocking my private key every time I booted a new system so I created the following to lazily initialize it when it's needed:

_ssh_add() {
    [ "$SSH_CONNECTION" ] && return

    local key=$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa

    ssh-add -l >/dev/null || ssh-add $key
}

ssh() {
    _ssh_add
    command ssh "$@"
}

scp() {
    _ssh_add
    command scp "$@"
}

git() {
    case $1 in
    	push|pull|fetch)
    		_ssh_add
    		;;
    esac

    command git "$@"
}

This has been tested on OpenBSD's ksh(1), zsh and bash.

For completeness this is how I start ssh-agent(1):

_ssh_agent() {
    command -v ssh-agent >/dev/null || return
    [ "$SSH_CONNECTION" ] && return

    local info=$HOME/.cache/ssh-agent-info

    [ -f $info ] && . $info >/dev/null

    [ "$SSH_AGENT_PID" ] && kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID 2>/dev/null || {
    	mkdir -p $(dirname $info)
    	ssh-agent >$info
    	. $info >/dev/null
    }
}

_ssh_agent

Eivind Uggedal