What is a good way to be able to directly send to STDIN and receive from STDOUT of a process? I'm specifically interested in SSH, as I want to do the following:
[ssh into a remote server]
[run remote commands]
[run local commands]
[run remote commands]
etc...
For example, let's say I have a local script "localScript" that will output the next command I want to run remotely, depending on the output of "remoteScript". I could do something like:
output=$(ssh myServer "./remoteScript")
nextCommand=$(./localScript $output)
ssh myServer "$nextCommand"
But it would be nice to do this without closing/reopening the SSH connection at every step.
You can redirect SSH input and output to FIFO-s and then use these for two-way communication.
For example local.sh:
#!/bin/sh
SSH_SERVER="myServer"
# Redirect SSH input and output to temporary named pipes (FIFOs)
SSH_IN=$(mktemp -u)
SSH_OUT=$(mktemp -u)
mkfifo "$SSH_IN" "$SSH_OUT"
ssh "$SSH_SERVER" "./remote.sh" < "$SSH_IN" > "$SSH_OUT" &
# Open the FIFO-s and clean up the files
exec 3>"$SSH_IN"
exec 4<"$SSH_OUT"
rm -f "$SSH_IN" "$SSH_OUT"
# Read and write
counter=0
echo "PING${counter}" >&3
cat <&4 | while read line; do
echo "Remote responded: $line"
sleep 1
counter=$((counter+1))
echo "PING${counter}" >&3
done
And simple remote.sh:
#!/bin/sh
while read line; do
echo "$line PONG"
done
The method you are using works, but I don't think you can reuse the same connection everytime. You can, however, do this using screen, tmux or nohup, but that would greatly increase the complexity of your script because you will now have to emulate keypresses/shortcuts. I'm not even sure if you can if you do directly in bash. If you want to emulate keypresses, you will have to run the script in a new x-terminal and use xdotool to emulate the keypresses.
Another method is to delegate the whole script to the SSH server by just running the script on the remote server itself:
ssh root#MachineB 'bash -s' < local_script.sh
The following ssh command does not return to terminal. It hangs though the execution is completed. The execution hangs after echo hi command.
ssh user#testserver "echo hello;source .profile;source .bash_profile;/apps/myapp/deploytools/ciInstallAndRun.sh; echo hi"
Output
hello
<outoutfrom remote script"
hi
ciInstallAndRun.sh
echo 'starting'
cd /apps/myapp/current
./tctl kill
cd /apps/myapp
mv myapp_v1.0 "myapp_v1.0_`date '+%Y%m%d%H%M'`"
unzip -o /apps/myapp/myappdist-bin.zip
java -classpath .:/apps/myapp/deploytools/cleanup.jar se.telenor.project.cleanup.Cleanup /apps/myapp myapp_v1.0_ 3
cd /apps/myapp/myapp_v1.0
echo 'Done with deploy'
chmod -R 775 *
echo 'Done'
./tctl start test
Source OS: Redhat
Dest Os: Solaris 10 8/07
Any idea to fix this.
Any idea to fix this.
Your installation script has spawned a child process.
Add a ps -f or ptree $$ command before echo hi. You'll see a child process or multiple child processes spawned by your install script.
To stop the SSH command from hanging, you need to detach such child process(es) from your terminal's input/output. You can sedirect your script's output to a file - both stdout and stderr with > /some/output/file 2>&1, and also redirect its input with < /dev/null.
Or you can use the nohup command.
You haven't provided an MCVE, as others have noted, but this is likely the problem command in you install script, since your question implies that you see the expected output from your install script:
./tctl start test
You probably would do better to replace it with something like:
./tctl start test </dev/null >/some/log/file/path.log 2>&1
Here is what I'm entering in Terminal:
curl --silent https://raw.githubusercontent.com/githubUser/repoName/master/installer.sh | bash
The WordPress installing bash script contains a "read password" command that is supposed to wait for users to input their MySQL password. But, for some reason, that doesn't happen when I run it with the "curl githubURL | bash" command. When I download the script via wget and run it via "sh installer.sh", it works fine.
What could be the cause of this? Any help is appreciated!
If you want to run a script on a remote server without saving it locally, you can try this.
#!/bin/bash
RunThis=$(lynx -dump http://127.0.0.1/example.sh)
if [ $? = 0 ] ; then
bash -c "$RunThis"
else
echo "There was a problem downloading the script"
exit 1
fi
In order to test it, I wrote an example.sh:
#!/bin/bash
# File /var/www/example.sh
echo "Example read:"
read line
echo "You typed: $line"
When I run Script.sh, the output looks like this.
$ ./Script.sh
Example read:
Hello World!
You typed: Hello World!
Unless you absolutely trust the remote scripts, I would avoid doing this without examining it before executing.
It wouldn't stop for read:
As when you are piping in a way you are forking a child which has been given input from parent shell.
You cannot give the values back to parent(modify parent's env) from child.
and through out this process you are always in parent process.
I am trying to pipe commands to an opened SSH session. The commands will be generated by a script, analyzing the results, and sending the next commands in accordance.
I do not want to put all the commands in a script on the remote host, and just run that script, because I am interested also in the status of the SSH process: sending locally the commands allow to "test" whether the SSH connection is alive or not, and get the appropriate return code from the SSH process.
I tried using something along these lines:
$ mkfifo /tpm/commands
$ ssh -t remote </tmp/commands
And from another term:
$ echo "command" >> /tmp/commands
Problem: SSH tells me that no pseudo-tty will be opened for stdin, and closes the connection as soon as "command" terminates.
I tried another approach:
$ ssh -t remote <<EOF
$(echo "command"; while true; do sleep 10; echo "command"; done)
EOF
But then, nothing is flushed to ssh until EOF is reached (in my case, never).
Do any of you have a solution ?
Stop closing /tmp/commands before you're done with it. When you close the pipe, ssh stops reading from it.
exec 7> /tmp/commands. # open once
echo foo >&7 # write multiple times
echo bar >&7
exec 7>&- # close once
You can additionally use ssh -tt to force ssh to open a tty on the remote.
This is a follow-on question to the How do you use ssh in a shell script? question. If I want to execute a command on the remote machine that runs in the background on that machine, how do I get the ssh command to return? When I try to just include the ampersand (&) at the end of the command it just hangs. The exact form of the command looks like this:
ssh user#target "cd /some/directory; program-to-execute &"
Any ideas? One thing to note is that logins to the target machine always produce a text banner and I have SSH keys set up so no password is required.
I had this problem in a program I wrote a year ago -- turns out the answer is rather complicated. You'll need to use nohup as well as output redirection, as explained in the wikipedia artcle on nohup, copied here for your convenience.
Nohuping backgrounded jobs is for
example useful when logged in via SSH,
since backgrounded jobs can cause the
shell to hang on logout due to a race
condition [2]. This problem can also
be overcome by redirecting all three
I/O streams:
nohup myprogram > foo.out 2> foo.err < /dev/null &
This has been the cleanest way to do it for me:-
ssh -n -f user#host "sh -c 'cd /whereever; nohup ./whatever > /dev/null 2>&1 &'"
The only thing running after this is the actual command on the remote machine
Redirect fd's
Output needs to be redirected with &>/dev/null which redirects both stderr and stdout to /dev/null and is a synonym of >/dev/null 2>/dev/null or >/dev/null 2>&1.
Parantheses
The best way is to use sh -c '( ( command ) & )' where command is anything.
ssh askapache 'sh -c "( ( nohup chown -R ask:ask /www/askapache.com &>/dev/null ) & )"'
Nohup Shell
You can also use nohup directly to launch the shell:
ssh askapache 'nohup sh -c "( ( chown -R ask:ask /www/askapache.com &>/dev/null ) & )"'
Nice Launch
Another trick is to use nice to launch the command/shell:
ssh askapache 'nice -n 19 sh -c "( ( nohup chown -R ask:ask /www/askapache.com &>/dev/null ) & )"'
If you don't/can't keep the connection open you could use screen, if you have the rights to install it.
user#localhost $ screen -t remote-command
user#localhost $ ssh user#target # now inside of a screen session
user#remotehost $ cd /some/directory; program-to-execute &
To detach the screen session: ctrl-a d
To list screen sessions:
screen -ls
To reattach a session:
screen -d -r remote-command
Note that screen can also create multiple shells within each session. A similar effect can be achieved with tmux.
user#localhost $ tmux
user#localhost $ ssh user#target # now inside of a tmux session
user#remotehost $ cd /some/directory; program-to-execute &
To detach the tmux session: ctrl-b d
To list screen sessions:
tmux list-sessions
To reattach a session:
tmux attach <session number>
The default tmux control key, 'ctrl-b', is somewhat difficult to use but there are several example tmux configs that ship with tmux that you can try.
I just wanted to show a working example that you can cut and paste:
ssh REMOTE "sh -c \"(nohup sleep 30; touch nohup-exit) > /dev/null &\""
You can do this without nohup:
ssh user#host 'myprogram >out.log 2>err.log &'
Quickest and easiest way is to use the 'at' command:
ssh user#target "at now -f /home/foo.sh"
I think you'll have to combine a couple of these answers to get what you want. If you use nohup in conjunction with the semicolon, and wrap the whole thing in quotes, then you get:
ssh user#target "cd /some/directory; nohup myprogram > foo.out 2> foo.err < /dev/null"
which seems to work for me. With nohup, you don't need to append the & to the command to be run. Also, if you don't need to read any of the output of the command, you can use
ssh user#target "cd /some/directory; nohup myprogram > /dev/null 2>&1"
to redirect all output to /dev/null.
This worked for me may times:
ssh -x remoteServer "cd yourRemoteDir; ./yourRemoteScript.sh </dev/null >/dev/null 2>&1 & "
You can do it like this...
sudo /home/script.sh -opt1 > /tmp/script.out &
It appeared quite convenient for me to have a remote tmux session using the tmux new -d <shell cmd> syntax like this:
ssh someone#elsewhere 'tmux new -d sleep 600'
This will launch new session on elsewhere host and ssh command on local machine will return to shell almost instantly. You can then ssh to the remote host and tmux attach to that session. Note that there's nothing about local tmux running, only remote!
Also, if you want your session to persist after the job is done, simply add a shell launcher after your command, but don't forget to enclose in quotes:
ssh someone#elsewhere 'tmux new -d "~/myscript.sh; bash"'
Actually, whenever I need to run a command on a remote machine that's complicated, I like to put the command in a script on the destination machine, and just run that script using ssh.
For example:
# simple_script.sh (located on remote server)
#!/bin/bash
cat /var/log/messages | grep <some value> | awk -F " " '{print $8}'
And then I just run this command on the source machine:
ssh user#ip "/path/to/simple_script.sh"
If you run remote command without allocating tty, redirect stdout/stderr works, nohup is not necessary.
ssh user#host 'background command &>/dev/null &'
If you use -t to allocate tty to run interactive command along with background command, and background command is the last command, like this:
ssh -t user#host 'bash -c "interactive command; nohup backgroud command &>/dev/null &"'
It's possible that background command doesn't actually start. There's race here:
bash exits after nohup starts. As a session leader, bash exit results in HUP signal sent to nohup process.
nohup ignores HUP signal.
If 1 completes before 2, the nohup process will exit and won't start the background command at all. We need to wait nohup start the background command. A simple workaroung is to just add a sleep:
ssh -t user#host 'bash -c "interactive command; nohup backgroud command &>/dev/null & sleep 1"'
The question was asked and answered years ago, I don't know if openssh behavior changed since then. I was testing on:
OpenSSH_8.6p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1g FIPS 21 Apr 2020
I was trying to do the same thing, but with the added complexity that I was trying to do it from Java. So on one machine running java, I was trying to run a script on another machine, in the background (with nohup).
From the command line, here is what worked: (you may not need the "-i keyFile" if you don't need it to ssh to the host)
ssh -i keyFile user#host bash -c "\"nohup ./script arg1 arg2 > output.txt 2>&1 &\""
Note that to my command line, there is one argument after the "-c", which is all in quotes. But for it to work on the other end, it still needs the quotes, so I had to put escaped quotes within it.
From java, here is what worked:
ProcessBuilder b = new ProcessBuilder("ssh", "-i", "keyFile", "bash", "-c",
"\"nohup ./script arg1 arg2 > output.txt 2>&1 &\"");
Process process = b.start();
// then read from process.getInputStream() and close it.
It took a bit of trial & error to get this working, but it seems to work well now.
YOUR-COMMAND &> YOUR-LOG.log &
This should run the command and assign a process id you can simply tail -f YOUR-LOG.log to see results written to it as they happen. you can log out anytime and the process will carry on
If you are using zsh then use program-to-execute &! is a zsh-specific shortcut to both background and disown the process, such that exiting the shell will leave it running.
A follow-on to #cmcginty's concise working example which also shows how to alternatively wrap the outer command in double quotes. This is how the template would look if invoked from within a PowerShell script (which can only interpolate variables from within double-quotes and ignores any variable expansion when wrapped in single quotes):
ssh user#server "sh -c `"($cmd) &>/dev/null </dev/null &`""
Inner double-quotes are escaped with back-tick instead of backslash. This allows $cmd to be composed by the PowerShell script, e.g. for deployment scripts and automation and the like. $cmd can even contain a multi-line heredoc if composed with unix LF.
First follow this procedure:
Log in on A as user a and generate a pair of authentication keys. Do not enter a passphrase:
a#A:~> ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/a/.ssh/id_rsa):
Created directory '/home/a/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/a/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
3e:4f:05:79:3a:9f:96:7c:3b:ad:e9:58:37:bc:37:e4 a#A
Now use ssh to create a directory ~/.ssh as user b on B. (The directory may already exist, which is fine):
a#A:~> ssh b#B mkdir -p .ssh
b#B's password:
Finally append a's new public key to b#B:.ssh/authorized_keys and enter b's password one last time:
a#A:~> cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh b#B 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'
b#B's password:
From now on you can log into B as b from A as a without password:
a#A:~> ssh b#B
then this will work without entering a password
ssh b#B "cd /some/directory; program-to-execute &"
I think this is what you need:
At first you need to install sshpass on your machine.
then you can write your own script:
while read pass port user ip; do
sshpass -p$pass ssh -p $port $user#$ip <<ENDSSH1
COMMAND 1
.
.
.
COMMAND n
ENDSSH1
done <<____HERE
PASS PORT USER IP
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
PASS PORT USER IP
____HERE