A couple of steps are needed before ssh -A. These can be automated in various ways depending on your preference. 1. make sure ssh-agent is running. Otherwise

A couple of steps are needed before ssh -A. These can be automated in various ways depending on your preference. 1. make sure ssh-agent is running. Otherwise, here is one way to run it. exec ssh-agent bash Make sure there is now an environment variable called SSH_AUTH_SOCK. On my macOS system, it is always running, so I don't need to do this. 2. add your key(s) to the agent. ssh-add # add all keys ssh-add -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 # add a specific key ssh-add -l # list keys in agent 3. ssh -A host1 Additional information like dot files are not provided in the remote session. Once you are logged on to host1, you can invoke ssh host2 without needing ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 on host1. If instead you say ssh -A host2, then from host2 you may ssh back into host1. So if you have a group of trusted machines, they can all ssh each other while ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 remains on a single machine.