On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 09:39:55PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote: > If the only thing you are interested in supporting is a one-shot > invocation, i.e. giving which identity file to use from the command > line when you run either "git push" or "git fetch", I suspect that > you could play with GIT_SSH environment variable, e.g. > > GIT_SSH_IDENTITY_FILE=$HOME/.ssh/id_for_example_com git push > > and do something ugly like the attached, I suppose. We already have GIT_SSH, so I would expect: GIT_SSH='ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/id_for_example_com' git push to work. But sadly, GIT_SSH does not use the shell, unlike most other configure git commands. :( We could consider it a consistency bug and fix it, though I suspect we may be annoying people on Windows who have spaces in their paths. If we do go the route of adding a new variable, it would make sense to add something for specifying arbitrary arguments, not just the identity file. Something like GIT_SSH_ARGS would be enough, though once you start handling splitting, dequoting, and interpreting variables, you're better off using the shell. So maybe GIT_SSH_SHELL or similar as a preferred version of GIT_SSH that uses the shell. > It also crossed my mind that you could (ab)use the credential helper > framework and ask it to return not the password but the identity > filename, and pass it down the callchain to git_connect(), but again > you will have to teach the credential helper as many settings as you > would need to make in ~/.ssh/config anyway, so I find it dubious how > it would be a win. You could write a credential helper shell script that knows about classes of remotes (e.g., selecting an identity file based on the hostname), and write only a few lines to cover a large number of hosts. For example: #!/bin/sh test "$1" = "get" || exit 0 while IFS== read key val; do test "$key" = "host" || continue case "$val" in *.example.com) echo sshident=com_key ;; *.example.net) echo sshident=net_key ;; esac done But it feels a bit hacky to be using the credential helpers at all for ssh connections. -Peff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html