WSL2 environment differs when accessing windows file systems.

Recently I was adding ssh keys my WSL2 environment to simplify version control activities on Git. After generating the public/private key pairs, I received an error when attempting to run the following command to add the SSH private keys to my authentication agent.

ssh-add ./id2_ed25519  #id_ed25519 it the private SSH key file
/mnt/d$ ssh-add ./id2_ed25519
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0777 for './id2_ed25519' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.

Upon doing some troubleshooting, chmod commands did not have the desired effect-

ls -lart
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ali  ali         102 Apr 25 22:13  id2_ed25519.pub
chmod 500 id2_ed25519.pub
ls -lart
-r-xr-xr-x 1 ali  ali         102 Apr 25 22:13  id2_ed25519.pub

It turns out I was running the commands in a windows directory(for ease of use with a windows-based code editor). The WSL2 environment does not have full access controls for files in the host file system.

Copying the key files to my home directory (~), allowed chmod to correctly apply the file permissions and add it to the authentication agent.

Further reading is recommended to locate file and directory permissions documentation when using WSL2.