openssh-agent polling

Alan Jenkins
Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:43:41 -0000

This may be a stupid question - but why does ssh-agent fork off a
child and then exec the subcommand in the *parent* process?  It forces
the agent in the child process to poll the parent, so it can exit when
the parent finishes.  If the agent was the parent process, it could
use wait() instead.  I'm sure there's some reason.

It'd be nice to take ssh-agent off the list of polling processes you
get with powertop[1], however far down it is.

Please CC me in replies

Yours, Alan

[1] http://www.linux-powertop.org