Override ssh command for git

Git supports a number of environment variables one of them being GIT_SSH. You can override the default ssh command (ssh of course) with that environment variable.

GIT_SSH=./my_ssh git pull origin master

In this case my_ssh is a bash executable file that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa $1 $2

An idea I got from this stack overflow answer.

Clearly the private key file I used is the default private key file so a bit redundant but its a way to add any options that might be necessary for the ssh connection, although specifying a host configuration in the ssh_config file might be simpler.

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