4.19 Issues with Cygwin ssh

This section needs a lot of work! Please help.

The recent Cygwin installation of ssh works only with a Cygwinized Emacs. You can check it by typing M-x eshell, and starting ssh test.host. The problem is evident if you see a message like this:

Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.

Older ssh versions of Cygwin are told to cooperate with TRAMP selecting sshx as the connection method. You can find information about setting up Cygwin in their FAQ at http://cygwin.com/faq/.

If you wish to use the scpx connection method, then you might have the problem that Emacs calls scp with a Windows file name such as c:/foo. The Cygwin version of scp does not know about Windows file names and interprets this as a remote file name on the host c.

One possible workaround is to write a wrapper script for scp which converts the Windows file name to a Cygwinized file name.

If you want to use either ssh based method on Windows, then you might encounter problems with ssh-agent. Using this program, you can avoid typing the pass-phrase every time you log in. However, if you start Emacs from a desktop shortcut, then the environment variable SSH_AUTH_SOCK is not set and so Emacs and thus TRAMP and thus ssh and scp started from TRAMP cannot communicate with ssh-agent. It works better to start Emacs from the shell.

If anyone knows how to start ssh-agent under Windows in such a way that desktop shortcuts can profit, please holler. I don’t really know anything at all about Windows…