Ksshaskpass is a front-end for ssh-add which stores the password of the sh key in KWallet. Ksshaskpass is not meant to be executed directly, you need to tell ssh-add about it. ssh-add will then call it if it is not associated to a terminal. From the ssh-add manpage: /---------------- | DISPLAY and SSH_ASKPASS | If ssh-add needs a passphrase, it will read the passphrase from the | current terminal if it was run from a terminal. If ssh-add does not | have a terminal associated with it but DISPLAY and SSH_ASKPASS are | set, it will execute the program specified by SSH_ASKPASS and open | an X11 window to read the passphrase. This is particularly useful | when calling ssh-add from a .xsession or related script. (Note that | on some machines it may be necessary to redirect the input from | /dev/null to make this work.) \---------------- This means you need to make sure to set the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable to the path of ksshaskpass and then call ssh-add from your autostart scripts. To add it to the KDE autostart sequence you could for example create an executable script with the following content in ~/.kde/Autostart/ (or maybe /.kde4/Autostart/, depending on the distribution). /---------------- |#!/bin/sh | |SSH_ASKPASS=ksshaskpass ssh-add < /dev/null \----------------