MacOS – Terminal displays directory of previous SSH location even when not running SSH

macossshterminal

I am using the terminal app to ssh and when I do, it conveniently tells me (at the very top) what and where I am logged into for example:

user@computer:/home/user/directory/

and so forth. However, when I exit the ssh session and am sitting nicely at my local directory, it still tells me the directory path of the place I was previously logged in to.

Is there any way to have it tell me that information only when I am actually logged in to a remote machine? I have already gone to Terminal -> preferences -> profiles -> window and I only have "Dimensions" checked.

Best Answer

Taken wholesale from this SuperUser.com question and answer...

The issue is that the shell on the remote host is configured to send an escape sequence to set the terminal window title. This is a fairly common setup. The solutions mentioned in the blog post you linked to are correct.

The simplest and most direct solution is to configure that same remote shell to reset the window title when it logs out. e.g., if the remote shell is bash, put this in ~/.bash_logout:

printf '\e]0;\a'

Alternatively, if you'd like to have your local shell update the window title with something useful, anyway, then do that. When the ssh connection ends, the local shell will set the window title to something else instead of leaving the stale value. e.g. put this in ~/.bashrc:

PS1='\[\e]1;\s\$ \W\a\e]2;\u@\h\a\]'"$PS1"

This puts the user and host name in the window title (which is typically what remote shells are configured to do), and also sets the tab title to show the shell name and type (normal user or root) and current working directory.

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Changing Terminal colors when ssh-ing into remote machine and back

I'm using the following.

Have a shell command, called myssh, with content:

PROFILE="$1";shift;
DEF="Basic" #the default profile name
echo "tell app \"Terminal\" to set current settings of first window to settings set \"${PROFILE}\""|osascript
ssh $@
echo "tell app \"Terminal\" to set current settings of first window to settings set \"${DEF}\""|osascript

and use bash aliases for the connect, like:

alias ssweb='myssh Homebrew user@web.example.com'
alias ssmail='myssh Ocean me@mail.example.com'

When I want to ssh into the web server, I simply write ssweb in the Terminal and I got the "Homebrew" profile. When the ssh session ends, the AppleScript sets back to the "Basic".

The aliases should go into your $HOME/.profile or similar bash-startup file.

The "Homebrew", "Ocean" etc. are the setting profiles from the Terminal.app preferences. You can also set up different fonts, encodings, etc.

Of course, you can use it directly (without aliases) like:

myssh Pro user@another.machine.example.com
       ^        ^
       |        ssh command arguments
       terminal profile name

MacOS – ssh terminal window closes immediately when opened

Here's what happened. On the machines I was trying to reach (10.x.y.182 and 10.x.y.194), in the time when I was not using them they had their hard disks replaced and the OS reinstalled. This gave them new SSH keys, invalidating the ones I had in my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Unfortunately, Terminal.app did not surface this problem to me.

By deleting the entries for those machines in ~/.ssh/known_hosts, I forced the system to pull down the new keys and ask me if I wanted to use them. With this done, connections worked perfectly as usual. Oddly, however, even before I changed ~/.ssh/known_hosts, connections using the DNS name of the machine (svr10 and svr20) worked. Weird.

Thanks, everyone, who looked at this problem.

Best Answer

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