ssh-agent and crontab -- is there a good way to get these to meet?
bash, cron, ssh-keys, unix
Solution
When you run ssh-agent -s, it launches a background process that you'll need to kill later. So, the minimum is to change your hack to something like:
eval `ssh-agent -s`
svn stuff
kill $SSH_AGENT_PID
However, I don't understand how this hack is working. Simply running an agent without also running ssh-add will not load any keys. Perhaps MacOS' ssh-agent is behaving differently than its manual page says it does.
Problem
I wrote a simple script which mails out svn activity logs nightly to our developers. Until now, I've run it on the same machine as the svn repository, so I didn't have to worry about authentication, I could just use svn's file:/// address style. Now I'm running the script on a home computer, accessing a remote repository, so I had to change to svn+ssh:// paths. With ssh-key nicely set up, I don't ever have to enter passwords for accessing the svn repository under normal circumstances. However, crontab did not have access to my ssh-keys / ssh-agent. I've read about this problem a few places on the web, and it's also alluded to here, without resolution: Why ssh fails from crontab but succedes when executed from a command line? My solution was to add this to the top of the script: ``` ### TOTAL HACK TO MAKE SSH-KEYS WORK ### eval `ssh-agent -s` ``` This seems to work under MacOSX 10.6. My question is, how terrible is this, and is there a better way?