01-19-2007
The passphrase is used for enhanced security I think. if you are connecting to a box that has a lot of users and more than one root user, it will be considered good practice to have this passphrase in your file. Otherwise someone can steal your private key and connect to the server without being asked for an additional feature as password.
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LEARN ABOUT NETBSD
ssh-add
SSH-ADD(1) BSD General Commands Manual SSH-ADD(1)
NAME
ssh-add -- adds private key identities to the authentication agent
SYNOPSIS
ssh-add [-cDdLlXx] [-t life] [file ...]
ssh-add -s pkcs11
ssh-add -e pkcs11
DESCRIPTION
ssh-add adds private key identities to the authentication agent, ssh-agent(1). When run without arguments, it adds the files ~/.ssh/id_rsa,
~/.ssh/id_dsa, ~/.ssh/id_ecdsa and ~/.ssh/identity. After loading a private key, ssh-add will try to load corresponding certificate informa-
tion from the filename obtained by appending -cert.pub to the name of the private key file. Alternative file names can be given on the com-
mand line.
If any file requires a passphrase, ssh-add asks for the passphrase from the user. The passphrase is read from the user's tty. ssh-add
retries the last passphrase if multiple identity files are given.
The authentication agent must be running and the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable must contain the name of its socket for ssh-add to work.
The options are as follows:
-c Indicates that added identities should be subject to confirmation before being used for authentication. Confirmation is performed by
the SSH_ASKPASS program mentioned below. Successful confirmation is signaled by a zero exit status from the SSH_ASKPASS program,
rather than text entered into the requester.
-D Deletes all identities from the agent.
-d Instead of adding identities, removes identities from the agent. If ssh-add has been run without arguments, the keys for the default
identities will be removed. Otherwise, the argument list will be interpreted as a list of paths to public key files and matching
keys will be removed from the agent. If no public key is found at a given path, ssh-add will append .pub and retry.
-e pkcs11
Remove keys provided by the PKCS#11 shared library pkcs11.
-L Lists public key parameters of all identities currently represented by the agent.
-l Lists fingerprints of all identities currently represented by the agent.
-s pkcs11
Add keys provided by the PKCS#11 shared library pkcs11.
-t life
Set a maximum lifetime when adding identities to an agent. The lifetime may be specified in seconds or in a time format specified in
sshd_config(5).
-X Unlock the agent.
-x Lock the agent with a password.
ENVIRONMENT
DISPLAY and SSH_ASKPASS
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 and SSH_ASKPASS are set, it will execute the program specified by SSH_ASKPASS and
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.)
SSH_AUTH_SOCK
Identifies the path of a UNIX-domain socket used to communicate with the agent.
FILES
~/.ssh/identity
Contains the protocol version 1 RSA authentication identity of the user.
~/.ssh/id_dsa
Contains the protocol version 2 DSA authentication identity of the user.
~/.ssh/id_ecdsa
Contains the protocol version 2 ECDSA authentication identity of the user.
~/.ssh/id_rsa
Contains the protocol version 2 RSA authentication identity of the user.
Identity files should not be readable by anyone but the user. Note that ssh-add ignores identity files if they are accessible by others.
EXIT STATUS
Exit status is 0 on success, 1 if the specified command fails, and 2 if ssh-add is unable to contact the authentication agent.
SEE ALSO
ssh(1), ssh-agent(1), ssh-keygen(1), sshd(8)
AUTHORS
OpenSSH is a derivative of the original and free ssh 1.2.12 release by Tatu Ylonen. Aaron Campbell, Bob Beck, Markus Friedl, Niels Provos,
Theo de Raadt and Dug Song removed many bugs, re-added newer features and created OpenSSH. Markus Friedl contributed the support for SSH
protocol versions 1.5 and 2.0.
BSD
October 28, 2010 BSD