Getting: _start_agent:18: command not found: ssh-agent

Question

Whenever I log into a box, I'm getting

_start_agent:18: command not found: ssh-agent

How can I resolve this problem?

Answer 1

This error, in my case, resulted from using Chezmoi to distribute dotfiles that configured (in ~/.zshrc) ohmyzsh with,

plugins=(ssh-agent)

The ssh-agent plugin for ohmyzsh, produces this rather obscure error if you try to run it without ssh-agent installed.

---

Note, if you're running this in a container you may also see these errors,

_start_agent:18: no such file or directory: /root/.ssh/environment-8c5f0414d6b3
chmod: /root/.ssh/environment-8c5f0414d6b3: No such file or directory
_start_agent:.:20: no such file or directory: /root/.ssh/environment-8c5f0414d6b3

If so you can see how to solve them here