4.8 Reusing passwords for several connections.

Sometimes it is necessary to connect to the same remote host several times. Reentering passwords again and again would be annoying, when the chosen method does not support access without password prompt through own configuration.

By default, tramp caches the passwords entered by you. They will be reused next time if a connection needs them for the same user name and host name, independently of the connection method.

Passwords are not saved permanently, that means the password caching is limited to the lifetime of your GNU Emacs session. You can influence the lifetime of password caching by customizing the variable password-cache-expiry. The value is the number of seconds how long passwords are cached. Setting it to nil disables the expiration.

A password is removed from the cache if a connection isn't established successfully. You can remove a password from the cache also by executing M-x tramp-clear-passwd in a buffer containing a related remote file or directory.

If you don't like this feature for security reasons, password caching can be disabled totally by customizing the variable password-cache (setting it to nil).

Implementation Note: password caching is based on the package password.el in No Gnus. For the time being, it is activated only when this package is seen in the load-path while loading tramp. It will be activated mandatory once No Gnus has found its way into GNU Emacs.