Pageant wildcard workaround

Using a key agent for SSH simplifies work. With PuTTY, you use pageant.exe. But there is a problem: You need to load all keyfiles manually. And if all keys are secured with a password you have to type the passwords a few times. However, pageant has one feature: You can pass keyfiles as parameters. If all keys are secured with the same passphrase you have to enter it only once. If you have multiple keyfiles you would like to use:

pageant.exe *.ppk

But unfortunately this does not work. This issue is already included in the wishlist (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/pageant-wildcard.html) but seems to be not yet implementet. In this article I show a small workaround

Workaround

I use the following cmd-file to enumerate all *.ppk files. The result is written to a variable and finally the pageant is called:

@echo off

SETLOCAL enabledelayedexpansion

FOR /f %%f IN ('DIR /B *.ppk') DO SET keylist=!keylist! %%f

start pageant.exe !keylist!

Kommentare

<comments />

wbrb meinte …

<comment date="2011-11-18T16:19:39Z" name="wbrb"> Thank you for this. I thought I had something wrong with the shortcut syntax. </comment>