Quote:
If you run the cygwin X server, then you can just run bash inside an xterm or rxvt or whatever. It almost, almost feels like a normal Unix situation except key things are broken. Most notably (to me, at any rate), if I start up ssh-agent and then run another xterm, it doesn't inherit the environment variables from the old shell, so I have to set the appropriate environment variables in the new shell.


+1

To make ssh-agent work in a shell that was spawned by a process that didn't know about the ssh-agent, put something like this in your .bashrc (i use zsh, dunno if any part of this won't work in bash):

Code:
start-agent ()
{
  if [[ -f ~/.ssh-auth ]]; then
    . ~/.ssh-auth
    [[ -e $SSH_AUTH_SOCK ]] && return
  fi
  eval $(ssh-agent) >/dev/null
  echo "SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" > ~/.ssh-auth
  echo "SSH_AGENT_PID=$SSH_AGENT_PID" >> ~/.ssh-auth
  [[ -n $DISPLAY ]] && ssh-add < /dev/null || ssh-add
}

kill-agent ()
{
  if [[ ! -z $SSH_AGENT_PID ]]; then
    rm -f ~/.ssh-auth
    kill -9 $SSH_AGENT_PID
    rm $SSH_AUTH_SOCK
    unset SSH_AUTH_SOCK SSH_AGENT_PID
  fi
}

start-agent


Now the "start-agent" function will check if there's a running agent, connect to the running one if there is, or otherwise start one (and add your default key). "kill-agent" will terminate the running agent if you want to for some reason.

To pass an environment variable (like XUSERFILESEARCHPATH) to all X programs, not just new shells, set it in your window manager startup script (.fvwmrc for me).
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