bashrc snippet for initializing ssh agent and adding ssh key

.bashrc_ssh

#!/bin/bash

# Set up ssh-agent
SSH_ENV="$HOME/.ssh/environment"

function start_agent {
    echo "Initializing new SSH agent..."
    touch $SSH_ENV
    chmod 600 "${SSH_ENV}"
    /usr/bin/ssh-agent | sed 's/^echo/#echo/' >> "${SSH_ENV}"
    . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
    /usr/bin/ssh-add
}

# Source SSH settings, if applicable
if [ -f "${SSH_ENV}" ]; then
    . "${SSH_ENV}" > /dev/null
    kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID 2>/dev/null || {
        start_agent
    }
else
    start_agent
fi

Nice work.

• I replaced touch and chmod with chmod -f ... to silence errors, and save 1 line.
• I removed echo to keep output clean when logging in.
• I removed sed to save overhead, and rely on > /dev/null to silence the output.