MacOSX & ssh-agent -l

[Ángel González]

Phil Pennock wrote:
> 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 don't have a Mac OS X to play with it, but if you have, sure you can 
test its
behavior with and without that parameter, and what it does?

Note you can get almost the same effect you want by doing:

ssh-agent -a ${SSH_AUTH_SOCK:-$(mktemp -d --tmpdir ssh-XXXXXXXXXXXX)/agent.$$}