MacOSX & ssh-agent -l

Phil Pennock phil.pennock at globnix.org
Sat Jul 23 06:30:15 EST 2011


Folks,

MacOSX 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) runs { ssh-agent -l }; that's not an
s/ssh-add/ssh-agent/ typo.  It appears to be an undocumented addition
(the man-pages were not updated).

I *suspect* that it just tells the agent to honour whatever pre-existing
value of $SSH_AUTH_SOCK it inherits and to try to listen to that.  I
don't know for sure.

Does anyone have details on what exactly it does, please?

I'm tempted to hack a more recent OpenSSH's ssh-agent to support it, so
I can switch which agent is launched by launchd and then load ECDSA
keys.

Thanks,
-Phil


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