[xmonad] darcs patch: add SshAgent module, to start ssh-agent when needed.

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH allbery at ece.cmu.edu
Sun Mar 30 19:40:15 EDT 2008


On Mar 30, 2008, at 9:35 , Jamie Webb wrote:
> On 2008-03-29 12:55:15 David Roundy wrote:
>> I'm sending this rather than pushing, since we're close to a
>> release.  It's a new module to automatically start an ssh-agent, if
>> one isn't running.  I expect to find it useful.  The reason for this
>> is that the ordinary mechanism for starting a single ssh-agent for an
>> X session doesn't seem to be working for me.  And starting xmonad
>> with `ssh-agent xmonad` does no good, because the ssh-agent exits as
>> soon as I restart xmonad.
>
> My .xsession has
>
>   eval `ssh-agent`
>
> before it starts xmonad, and it seems to work fine. Does this not work
> for you?

One caveat:  .xsession is almost always a {,ba}sh script but the  
user's $SHELL might be {,t}csh, leading ssh-agent to do the wrong  
thing.  Safest is "eval `ssh-agent -s`" to force it to use the sh/ 
bash commands.

We tossed this around a bit on #xmonad last night and the above was  
the preferred solution.  A variant that may solve other odd problems  
regarding placement and relay of ssh agent information to all  
subprocesses is:

	mv .xsession .xsession-real
	echo '#! /bin/sh' >.xsession
	echo 'exec ssh-agent $HOME/.xsession-real' >>.xsession
	chmod +x .xsession

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH




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