Using Putty Private keys on Mac OS X

I spent quite a bit of time this morning working on an issue with my ssh private keys. I originally generated them using Putty and worked from a Windows XP box. I needed to use these same private keys on my MacBook Pro. I didn't really find any precise documentation on doing this so perhaps these steps will help anyone else that needs to use their private keys with two different operating systems.

1. On the Windows side open puttygen and load your private key.
2. Select "Conversions" menu and "Export OpenSSH Key" from that menu. Save the file somewhere on your hard drive.
3. Copy the public key from the diaglog box and paste that into notepad. Save that file with the other as the public key.
4. Copy both these files to the Mac (maintain carriage returns). For ease of use name these files id_dsa (for the private key file) and id_dsa.pub (for the public key file) and store them in /Users/username/.ssh.
5. Permissions should be rw for owner and r for all.

Note about user name.
If the system you are logging into is using a different user name be sure and include that on the ssh command line. For instance if my user name on my osx login is bob but the remote host expects fred I have to use the login parameter of ssh as follows:
ssh -l fred