January 1, 2008

Close your frozen ssh session

I am working with Linux quite a lot and sometimes I face this situation: I have a terminal with ssh connected to a remote server and after a while the ssh connection gets frozen on a remote side for some reasons. Now what? I used to find the PID of the ssh process in another terminal and then used kill -9 PID. This method looked a bit too "brute force" just for closing the broken ssh session and I was looking for a more "elegant" solution. Like when I am telnet_ed somewhere, I can use the CRTL+] key sequence as a escape character to break the connection. I found a similar solution for ssh: [enter]~. First press the Enter key, then tilde, and then add a dot and your ssh session will be closed and you can continue your work in back in freed terminal.
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14 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 22, 2008 at 4:22 PM

    THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!! I have been wondering about this for years! I am a bit fanatical about archiving my bash history, so I always want to kill frozen ssh connections (usually the result of closing my laptop) from a separate [Gnu] screen window and exit bash properly. When I have 10+ windows in screen with different ssh connects in N-1 of them, it is a pain.

    Oh, and if that sounds careless, consider that I run screen both locally and remotely. That way anytime I reconnect to a server I see the terminal exactly the way I left it. (Just be careful not to leave yourself "sudo su -"ed, that's poor security.) If you aren't familiar with Gnu Screen, get informed.

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  2. AnonymousDecember 3, 2009 at 7:55 PM

    Many thanks Jozef, this is the best tip I got since a long time

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  3. AnonymousDecember 21, 2009 at 9:08 PM

    Worked a charm. Thank you!

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  4. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2010 at 6:10 PM

    Ah, well... didn't work for me, but my problem is worse.

    I have a screened ssh session stuck within an ssh session. I tried to log out of it, and it got stuck. No escapes work. The only way I know of to kill it is to kill screen session itself, which I don't want to do.

    Any elegant way of fixing this?

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  5. Jozef JanitorJanuary 24, 2010 at 10:23 PM

    @Anonymous: well, maybe screen is doing some characters translation (like the CRTL+A has a special use with screen), and therefore you might want to use a slightly different keys combination.
    Or ... if you can SSH to that server once again (open a new session), then just use the pretty good old way: find your fronzen SSH's PID and kill it with "kill -9 $PID".

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  6. AnonymousMay 17, 2011 at 3:18 PM

    Thank you a lot. This was bothering me for months.

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  7. EscapeeOctober 4, 2011 at 8:12 AM

    Thanks a lot!

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  8. AnonymousOctober 27, 2011 at 5:08 PM

    Thanks! I've been killing them for years. I should have googled ages ago.

    @RichardBronosky
    Regarding the keeping of your bash history - try adding PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' to your .bashrc. You'll never lose another command again! ;-)

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  10. AnonymousMarch 25, 2012 at 4:13 PM

    This has been bothering me for years. I'm very happy that I googled it today :)
    Thank you very much!

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  12. AnonymousJuly 8, 2012 at 3:46 PM

    Perfect trick!
    Thank you :)

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  13. AnonymousJuly 24, 2012 at 6:52 PM

    WOW...Many thanks! Worked great and something I always wanted to know...and needed.

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  14. UnknownMarch 13, 2013 at 3:57 PM

    ThankS!
    "Everything I always wanted to know about ssh but was afraid to ask...!"

    ReplyDelete