SSH-ADD(1) SSH SSH-ADD(1)NAMEssh-add - adds identities for the authentication agent
SYNOPSISssh-add [-p] [-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. Alterna‐
tive 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 -p
option is given then the passphrase is read from stdin, otherwise 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-p Read passphrase from stdin (or pipe).
-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 use‐
ful in scripts.
0 The requested operation was performed successfully.
1 No connection could be made to the authentication agent. Pre‐
sumably 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 par‐
ticularly 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@ssh.fi>
SEE ALSOssh-agent(1), ssh-keygen(1), ssh(1), sshd(8)SSH November 8, 1995 SSH-ADD(1)
