ssh-agent: Could not open a connection to your authentication agent

Question

I have done a ton of research already, but none of those works. This is output from my terminal:

$ ps aux | grep ssh-agent
tsiruan   4080  0.0  0.0  13468   388 ?        Ss   11:47   0:00 ssh-agent
$ env | grep SSH
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-8CJH68abyLAa/agent.4079
SSH_AGENT_PID=4080
$ sudo ssh-add .ssh/bitbucket_ssh
[sudo] password for tsiruan:
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

I have tried $ eval $(ssh-agent) with backticks, single quote, double quote, with and without parentheses, with and without -s option, and even some answers like:

$ exec ssh-agent bash

please help me , I am running bash on arch linux.

Solution

First Choice: Don't Use sudo

ssh-add .ssh/bitbucket_ssh

Second Choice: Pass The Environment Variable Explicitly

Assuming your bitbucket_ssh file is only readable by root -- the more appropriate approach is to fix the permissions, but as an interim approach, you can pass SSH_AUTH_SOCK through:

sudo env SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" ssh-add .ssh/bitbucket_ssh

Comments

[Charles Duffy]

StackOverflow is for questions about writing software. Consider Unix & Linux or SuperUser for questions about using tools that shipped with your system.

[Charles Duffy]

that said, the big problem here is that you're using sudo to run ssh-add. When you run sudo, that makes your command run as a different user, with a different environment (so it no longer has your SSH_AUTH_SOCK). This is the same problem asked on Unix.SE here.

[Charles Duffy]

BTW -- using sudo on commands where you shouldn't have to use sudo often creates permission problems that force you to use sudo again later (when you otherwise wouldn't need it). It's a tool that should only be used when you have a very specific reason to do so.

[Tsiruan]

Thank you for your detailed explanation!

[Charles Duffy]

Community Wiki since this is answering a known-off-topic question.