On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 7:51 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: > Now, I find that when I log out, ssh-agent IS NOT STOPPED, even though I > am logged all the way out. When I log out, unless I background something, > everything running as me should go away. Everything. ssh-agent is designed to run in the manner of a daemon process, so that you can connect to it from multiple clients which may be associated with independent logins (or with no login at all). A quick look at "man ssh-agent" would have told you several things: (1) You can put a time limit on the life of identities added by ssh-add, by starting ssh-agent with the -t option. However, the default is forever. (2) You can force ssh-agent to exit when you log out by arranging for "ssh-agent -k" to run. How this is accomplished depends on your login shell; "trap 'ssh-agent -k' EXIT" might be one way if there is no configuration file read at logout time. (3) As Todd Denniston pointed out, running ssh-agent with a command to execute sets up the agent to exit when the command itself completes. As you're already starting ssh-agent by hand in a terminal window, that should be almost as easy as "exec ssh-agent $SHELL".