Loading keys automatically with Pageant on Windows.

For those who work remotely on Linux from a Windows machine, they are probably familiar with the PuTTY set of tools for SSH connection management.

For managing keys in the PuTTY client you use pageant which, by default, when you open it will not load any keys. This is easily fixed just by creating a shortcut to the actual pageant program and in the box labelled 

"Target" you should see the path to the executable in double quotes. To load a key automatically when you click this shortcut, just type the full path to the key that you wish to load after the quotes. To add more than one key give a space separated list of full paths to each key you wish to load. 

Here are a couple of examples:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\pageant.exe" D:\SSH\mykey.ppk
The above will load the key "mykey.ppk" when you click on the shortcut.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\pageant.exe" D:\SSH\mykey1.ppk D:\SSH\mykey2.ppk D:\SSH\mykey3.ppk
The above will load the three keys when run from the shortcut.

As an added bonus, you could even place the shortcut in the startup start menu folder to have pageant start up on boot with all your keys loaded. Hopefully this saves someone some time. :)