I received and installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on Friday, now I’m getting used to it and will be posting a series of short notes about interesting features as they appear.

One of the first things I noticed is that Leopard seems to start ssh-agent at login. A little more digging reveals that this is due to a LaunchAgent provided by Apple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN""http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>org.openbsd.ssh-agent</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/bin/ssh-agent</string>
                <string>-l</string>
        </array>
        <key>ServiceIPC</key>
        <true/>
        <key>Sockets</key>
        <dict>
                <key>Listeners</key>
                <dict>
                        <key>SecureSocketWithKey</key>
                        <string>SSH_AUTH_SOCK</string>
                </dict>
        </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

The above causes the agent to be dynamically launched only when you actually need it. That is really cool!

Updated: I just read this hint which mentions that there is also a nice Cocoa ssh-ask-pass in Leopard! Funny thing is that I had seen the dialog a few times without noticing it at all, it seems to just be a normal occurrence.