I've moved the setup and running of the actual agent server into
run_agent(), so that main() is now only command-line parsing and
validation. We recognise a collection of new command-line options for
talking to an existing agent as a client (analogous to ssh-add), which
go to a new run_client() function, but I haven't filled in that
function itself yet.
Now --exec instantly terminates option processing, by treating
everything after it as the command. This means it doesn't matter if
the --exec command word looks like another option, and it also means
we can simplify the handling of real non-option argument words, when I
get round to adding some for loading keys.
This is intended to be a useful mode when you want to run an ssh agent
in a terminal session with no X11 available. You just execute a
command along the lines of eval $(pageant -T), and then Pageant will
run in the background for the rest of that terminal session - and when
the terminal session ends, so that Pageant loses its controlling tty,
it will take that as the signal to shut down. So, no need to manually
kill it, and unlike 'pageant --exec $SHELL', you can also do this half
way through a session if you don't realise until later that you need
an SSH agent, without losing any shell command history or other shell
context that you've accumulated so far in the session.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any reliable way to
actually implement this -T mode, short of having Pageant wake up at
regular intervals and try to open /dev/tty to see if it's still there.
I had hoped that I could arrange to reliably get SIGHUP, or select on
/dev/tty for exceptional conditions, or some such, but nothing I've
tried along those lines seems to work.
I've moved the listening socket setup back to before the lifetime
preparations, so in particular we find out that we couldn't bind to
the socket _before_ we fork. The only part that really needed to come
after lifetime setup was the logging setup, so that's now a separate
function called later.
Also, the random exit(0)s in silly places like x11_closing have turned
into setting a time_to_die flag, so that all clean exits funnel back
to the end of main() which at least tries to tidy up a bit afterwards.
(Finally, fixed a small bug in testing the return value of waitpid(),
which only showed up once we didn't exit(0) after the first wait.
Ahem.)
Now it actually logs all its requests and responses, the fingerprints
of keys mentioned in all messages, and so on.
I've also added the -v option, which causes Pageant in any mode to
direct that logging information to standard error. In --debug mode,
however, the logging output goes to standard output instead (because
when debugging, that information changes from a side effect to the
thing you actually wanted in the first place :-).
An internal tweak: the logging functions now take a va_list rather
than an actual variadic argument list, so that I can pass it through
several functions.
LIFE_EXEC is already dealt with, and I forgot to take out the comment
reminding me to do it, ahem.
The LIFE_PARENT mentioned in the same comment was an idea I had but
couldn't think of a way to make it work: if you have a terminal-only
shell session in which you want to eval $(ssh-agent), then it's
annoying and fragile to have to remember to kill the agent when you
log out, so you'd like it to automatically tie its lifetime to that of
the shell from which you invoked it. Unfortunately, I don't know of
any way to do that without race conditions. (E.g. if only pageant
didn't fork, then it could poll its own ppid until it became 1 - but
the child process would find it was 1 already.)
This is much more like ssh-agent than the Windows version is - it sets
SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID as its means of being found by other
processes, rather than Windows Pageant's approach of establishing
itself in a well-known location. But the actual agent code is the same
as Windows Pageant.
For the moment, this is an experimental utility and I don't expect it
to be useful to many people; its immediate use to me is that it
provides a way to test and debug the agent code on Unix, and also to
use the agent interface as a convenient way to exercise public key
functions I want to debug. And of course it means I can be constantly
using and testing my own code, on whatever platform I happen to be
using. In the further future, I have a list of possible features I
might add to it, but I don't know which ones I'll decide are
worthwhile.
One feature I've already put in is a wider range of lifetime
management options than ssh-agent: the -X mode causes Pageant to make
a connection to your X display, and automatically terminate when that
connection closes, so that it has the same lifetime as your X session
without having to do the cumbersome trick of exec()ing the subsequent
session-management process.
