OpenSSH, that ships with Cygwin has a nice utility called ssh-agent. This program
is a daemon that will hold on to your keys so that hosts you are
authorized to log on to will not continually ask for your
password. This is especially useful when working with CVS repositories over SSH. When you
run ssh-agent, it spits out text that should be evaluated to set two
environment variables that you will need in order to run ssh-add, to
actually add your keys to it. That output looks like this:
On a Unix system, it's easy to capture
the output of ssh-agent and evaluate it, but under the 'command shell'
that ships with Windows systems, which is so patheticly crippled that
my old Commodore 64's BASIC-based shell is looking pretty good, you
can't do that.
So what are those poor saps, myself included, who are
using Windows systems to do? Ruby
to the rescue. I wrote a simple
script that executes ssh-agent, capturing the output, massaging it a
little, and then creating a batch file that I can run to set the
necessary variables. Simply redirecting the output to a batch file
won't work because there are some Unix-isms, such as exporting the
variables, that don't work on Windows. So, here's the script:
1 #!ruby
2
3 lines = %x{ssh-agent}
4
5 File.open("c:/tmp/sde.bat", "w") do |file|
6 lines.each do |line|
7 chunks = line.chomp.split ';'
8
9 if<
1000
;/b> chunks[0] =~ /^SSH/
10 file.puts "SET #{chunks[0]}"
11 end
12 end
13 end
You can see that the script sends the captured and massaged output to a
batch file called "sde.bat" located in C:/tmp. You can change both of
these to suit your preference. Once the script runs, I simply execute
the generated batch file and then run ssh-add. The nice thing about
the generated batch file is that it lingers until the next time I run
the Ruby script. Thus as I open new console Windows I can re-run it to
get the environment variables set properly in each one.
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