What is the purpose of the SSH agent?
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What is the purpose of the SSH agent?
The SSH agent is a helper utility to temporarily store private keys when using public key authentication. It acts as an authentication agent for clients such as the ssh command.
The ssh-agent command starts the SSH agent, a helper utility to store private keys when using public key authentication. The ssh-agent process is usually started at the the beginning of a login session and then can be connected to by a SSH client. Clients can detect the environment variable named SSH_AUTH_SOCK.
