You can set up Keychain to automate the creation of the ssh-agent. If you are using cygwin you can install Keychain using the cygwin setup.exe (its under Utils). Here are some links to get you started with learning about Keychain and its installation under cygwin. Once its up and running it should create the ssh-agent when you open a new cygwin session.

Installation steps I followed:

http://cri.ch/linux/docs/sk0019.html

I needed to create the .bash_profile file by copying over /etc/defaults/etc/skel/.bash_profile to my home directory (cd ~ to get there).

However, I did not need to follow these steps:

Finally we will add the line source ~/.keychain/ws-sven-sh to ~/.bashrc to have these env-vars present in every shell.

or:

if you are using scripts just add source ~/.keychain/computer-name-sh ...

Some additional information on RSA-DSA keys/ssh-agent/Keychain:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html

Read all three pages as it is a pretty comprehensive overview.

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