For some reason that I haven’t yet worked out my OS X SSH Agent has stopped prompting me for a password when I load it up to add my private key. So I wondered what’s involved to manage my ssh keys with the command line instead.
First up, I had to install my public and private keys in ~/.ssh/
drwx------ 5 paul paul 170 Apr 24 20:32 . drwxr-xr-x 40 paul paul 1360 Apr 18 23:19 .. -rwx------ 1 paul paul 951 Oct 6 2006 id_rsa -rwx------ 1 paul paul 218 Oct 6 2006 id_rsa.pub
Note the folder needs to be owned by your user with 700 permissions.
Once the keys are in, the actual process of starting an ssh-agent and adding a key is pretty straightforward:
eval `ssh-agent` ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
You will be prompted for a password and then that’s it! To confirm your key has been added correctly, you can list all the keys in your agent with:
ssh-add -l