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Please provide as much information as possible. At least, this should include a description of your issue and steps to reproduce the problem. If possible please provide a summary of what steps or workarounds you have already tried, and any docs or articles you found (un)helpful.

Problem you have encountered:

When trying to run gcloud cloud-shell ssh --ssh-key-file=~/.ssh/id_rsa, the following error appears:

ERROR: (gcloud.cloud-shell.ssh) argument --ssh-key-file: ignored explicit argument '~/.ssh/id_rsa'
Usage: gcloud cloud-shell ssh [optional flags]
  optional flags may be  --authorize-session | --command | --dry-run |
                         --force-key-file-overwrite | --help | --ssh-flag |
                         --ssh-key-file

For detailed information on this command and its flags, run:
  gcloud cloud-shell ssh --help

What you expected to happen:

For the CLI to accept a string as the argument of that flag.

Steps to reproduce:

Create a key:

ssh-keygen

Use that key to connect to the cloud shell through the CLI:

gcloud cloud-shell ssh --ssh-key-file=~/.ssh/id_rsa

Other information (workarounds you have tried, documentation consulted, etc):

Root cause:

On the file <gcloud path>/lib/googlecloudsdk/command_lib/cloud_shell/util.py, that argument is parsed using argparse with the following code:

parser.add_argument(
    '--ssh-key-file',
    help="""\
    The path to the SSH key file. By default, this is
      *~/.ssh/google_compute_engine*.
    """,
    action='store_true')

That action means that argument will only accept a boolean.

Workaround:

Replace store_true by store:

sed -zi 's/store_true/store/2' $(gcloud info --format 'value(installation.sdk_root)')/lib/googlecloudsdk/command_lib/cloud_shell/util.py

Proposed fix:

Change store_true for store in the code.

Related community posts:

https://stackoverflow.com/q/70608840