SSH-ADD(1)

NAME
ssh-add - adds identities for the authentication agent

SYNOPSIS
ssh-add [-l ] [-d ] [-D ] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

Ssh-add adds identities to the authentication agent, ssh-agent. 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. If the user is using X11, the passphrase is requested using a small X11 program; otherwise it is read from the user's tty. (Note: it may be necessary to redirect stdin from /dev/null to get the passphrase requested using X11.)

The authentication agent must be running and must be an ancestor of the current process for ssh-add to work.

OPTIONS

-l  Lists 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.

RETURN STATUS
Ssh-add returns one of the following exit statuses. These may be useful in scripts.

0   The requested operation was performed successfully.

1   No connection could be made to the authentication agent. Presumably there is no authentication agent active in the execution environment of ssh-add.

2   The user did not supply a required passphrase.

3   An identify file could not be found, was not readable, or was in bad format.

4   The agent does not have the requested identity.

5   An unspecified error has occurred; this is a catch-all for errors not listed above.

FILES

$HOME/.ssh/identity
    Contains the RSA authentication identity of the user. This file should not be readable by anyone but the user. 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.

    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 is set, it will 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.)

AUTHOR

Tatu Ylonen <ylo@cs.hut.fi>

SEE ALSO
ssh-agent(1), ssh-keygen(1), ssh(1), sshd(8)