Thunar's Open Terminal Here is missing the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable

[Forest]

When I launch xfce4-terminal from Xfce's Applications menu, the terminal preserves the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable, and I can ssh using my key to authenticate with no trouble.

When I launch it from Thunar's Open Terminal Here menu, SSH_AUTH_SOCK is missing from the environment, so I have to manually enter my passphrase to use ssh, scp, or any program that uses them (like git push). Yuck.

The behavior of the first-opened terminal window persists into all subsequent terminal windows, since they reuse the existing xfce4-terminal process. So, if you're testing, be sure to close all terminal windows first.

[Forest (foresto)]

Possibly related, but not necessarily the same bug:
https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10806

[Forest (foresto)]

Chasing this down a bit further:

It looks like this happens because SSH_AUTH_SOCK is not set in the "Thunar --daemon" process that persists even when I close all Thunar windows. I guess that process must get launched during xfce session setup, before SSH_AUTH_SOCK makes it into the session environment. If I kill that process and launch a foreground instance of Thunar, Open Terminal Here launches a terminal with SSH_AUTH_SOCK intact.

So, I suppose the next questions are:
What is launching Thunar --daemon?
What is copying the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable into the session?
How do we get these things to happen in the right order?

[Alex Dueppen (adueppen)]

This issue doesn't seem to be occurring as of the 20160110 Xubuntu ISO (Thunar 1.6.10)

[Forest (foresto)]

I'm using thunar 1.6.10-1 on xubuntu 15.10, and the bug is still present.

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

The Xfce session launches "Thunar --daemon" on session start.

https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/tree/settings/xfce4-session.xml

Is this bug still present in 18.04 or 18.10?

[Forest (foresto)]

Yes, still present in 18.04.

[Theo Linkspfeifer (lastonestanding)]

This report appears to be related:
https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13486

[Sean Davis (bluesabre)]

Reportedly fixed upstream in version 4.13.1.