billpratt.net

I wanted something similar to Keychain on OSx for Linux and I remembered a shell script from years ago. I did a quick yum search and found a keychain package managed by Gentoo. You can find the full how-to here, but the basics are simple if you are familiar with ssh keys at all. First, install it using sudo install keychain. After it’s installed, add a line to your ~/.bash_profile that looks similar to:

/usr/bin/keychain ~/.ssh/id_dsa
. ~/.keychain/`uname -n`-sh

Then add the following line to .bashrc as some terminals (gnome-terminal for one) do not log in each time and will not see the sourced environment variables above:

. ~/.keychain/`uname -n`-sh

You can add as many paths to private keys as you want. Now fire up a terminal, and you will be prompted for you passphrases as if you had run ssh-add. From now on, any terminal you start will have your keys loaded. It works well and I have not had any problems yet. See the man page or the link above if you want further information as there are options that I have not mentioned here that you may be interested in.

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