How to ssh-add in cron job
EDIT: updated link in this article. ssh-add can let your ssh-agent remember the passphrase of your ssh secret key, so that you don't need to type any password when loging into a remote machine. However, it is an interactive program, you can't call it in a cron job. Even if you can, you will expose your passphrase in a file, which is not safe. The solution is actually very easy. You don't really need to ssh-add. All you need to do is letting ssh know some environment variable. First of all, I recommend you set up ssh-agent forwarding with GNU screen following instruction here: http://www.deadman.org/sshscreen.php Then in your cron job script, source ${HOME}/bin/fixssh first. Done! Enjoy ;)