NAME

resock —

connect to a usable SSH authentication agent

SYNOPSIS

resock

DESCRIPTION

The resock utility attempts to connect to an SSH authentication agent by looking for its Unix-domain socket in the /tmp/ssh-* directories. It looks for agent sockets in a directory owned by the current user and outputs the name of the most recently created one in the hope that it would be actually active at the present time.

The output of the resock utility is in the format suitable for direct use by the eval command of Bourne-like shells. Its main intended purpose is to be able to easily connect to the new SSH agent socket after reconnecting to e.g. a screen(1) session on a remote host, since the environment of the processes running in the screen session will contain an incorrect outdated value for the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable (as it was at the time of the creation of the screen session).

RETURN VALUES

The resock utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

ENVIRONMENT

The resock utility's operation is currently not directly affected by its environment.

FILES

The resock utility examines the /tmp/ssh-* directories and looks for Unix-domain sockets named agent.*.

EXAMPLES

Set the appropriate environment variables for the currently active SSH agent:

eval `resock`

HISTORY

The resock utility was written by Peter Pentchev in 2010.

AUTHORS

Peter Penchev ⟨roam@ringlet.net⟩

BUGS

*: always looks for the most recent agent socket, which might not really be alive (the agent process itself may have been killed before cleaning up); should attempt to actually connect to the agent.
*: always uses the output of whoami(1) as the owner of the agent socket; maybe there should be more heuristics (check the validity, try the USER or LOGIN environment variables) or even an -u command-line option.