MacOS – Change stored remote host names in terminal application en mass

command linemacossshterminal

I have been using the simple hostname to ssh into remote hosts, around 100 systems. There has been a change in configuration of the network that will require FQDNs.

Rather than recreating all my remote system names (stored in terminal and shown when pressing shift-command-k )

Can I edit the stored data to add the domain information to the existing entries?

Best Answer

The host names are stored in the Terminal settings .plist in the users /Library/Preferences folder:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist

Edit the .plist

The easiest way to edit a batch of these is by editing the plist with a tool like VSCode (free) with the Binary Plist Extension or your favorite text editor with plist support.¹ You can also convert the plist to XML (and back to binary) using plutil.² This will allow you to use any text editor like TextEdit that doesn't natively support plist formats.

Important: I suggest making a backup copy of the plist before you start editing in case you want to revert back to the original.

You can find all of your servers in the array under the PermanentServers key as shown below. Simply go in and fix the FDQN as needed. If the domain suffixes are all the same, a simple Find/Replace should speed through the task.

Save the file and reload Terminal. For this example, I added the FQDN .newFQDN to each entry and restarted Terminal. Here's the result:

Alternate Method using `defaults read/write`

You can get the names of the server with the defaults read command:

$ defaults read -app Terminal PermanentServers

(
    "host1.FQDN",
    "host2.FQDN",
    "host3.FQDN",
    "host4.FQDN"
)

You can set your new servers by overwriting that array with a new one as follows:

$ defaults write -app Terminal PermanentServers -array '(host1.newFQDN, host2.newFQDN, host3.newFQDN, host4.newFQDN)'

You can then reissue the defaults read command to check the results. The upside to this is that you don't need TextWrangler and you can script it. However, it's difficult to do a large number on the command line so, you'll want to edit it first in a text editor to make sure you have no mistakes.

¹In the first version of this answer, I originally referred to TextWrangler as it was a tool I originally used to view/edit plist files. However, I've been transitioning to VSCode as it's cross platform - macOS, Windows, and even FreeBSD, I discovered a plist plugin that allowed me to finally get rid of TextWrangler, not that it's "bad" in any way; I'm just trying to streamline my dev tools.

²To convert a binary plist to XML for editing, issue the command plutil -convert xml1 foobar.plist. Once you're finished editing, save it then convert it back to binary with the command plutil -convert binary1 foobar.plist

Related Solutions

Auto open 4 terminal sessions and SSH them to a given host

You could try creating a profile for each tab (changing Shell > Run command), opening tabs for each profile in some window, and then saving the window as a window group. See this answer.

Or use an AppleScript like this:

tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    do script "echo 1" -- this always opens a new window
    tell application "System Events"
        keystroke "t" using command down
    end tell
    do script "echo 2" in window 1
end tell

MacBook – Rename terminal tab to host alias in ssh config

EDIT: On Yosemite (OS X 10.10) use this instead:

function ssh () 
{ 
     servername=$(echo $@ | sed -E 's|([- a-zA-Z0-9:/]+)( *[^@ ]*@)([^@ ]*)|\3|')
     echo -ne "\033]0;${servername}\007";
     /usr/bin/ssh $@
}

Note that the function expects username and server name to be specified as user@server (you can use the server IP address too: user@a.b.c.d, the tab name will be set to a.b.c.d). Other combinations like -l user server won't work properly.

You can unset the function with:

unset -f ssh

You can create a function named ssh that sets the terminal tab name and then invokes /usr/sbin/ssh:

function ssh () 
{ 
    servername=$(echo $@ | sed 's|\([- a-zA-Z0-9:/]\+\) *\([^-]\+@\)*\([-a-zA-Z0-9.]\+\)|\3|' | awk '{print $1}');
    echo -ne "\033]0;${servername}\007";
    /usr/bin/ssh $@
}

servername=$(echo $@ ...

The first line extracts the server name from the arguments passed to ssh. I tested it against several possible ssh invocations with and without arguments but can't promise it's bullet proof.
echo -ne "\033]0;${servername}\007";

The second line is where the magic happens. \033]0;<name>\007 is a ESCAPE sequence that sets the terminal tab name. See this Wikipedia article for more information - this particular escape code is listed in the non-CSI codes section.
/usr/bin/ssh $@

Start /usr/bin/ssh with arguments provided.

Add the function to your ~/.bashrc file (if you don't use bash modify it to match your shell syntax and add it to your shell's startup file) so that it's always accessible.

Note that it will also set the terminal tab name when executing a remote command:

ssh user@server command

for example:

ssh jaume@myserver ls -l /