Bash – Run ssh login command without modifying remote .bashrc

bashbashrcssh

We have a bunch of servers set up with set -o vi in their ~/.bashrc.

It would be nice to be able to ssh into these boxes and automagically run set -o emacs as a timesave.

I've seen a solution indicating that such additions should be made on the remote host ~/.bashrc but we cannot modify these for various reasons.

Another solution suggests using:

spawn ssh -t user@host "set -o emacs; /bin/bash -i"

..but I understand this requires running the expect shell instead of plain bash.

Is there a simple way to achieve this goal? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Best Answer

ssh -t user@host bash -o emacs -i

Related Solutions

Bash – Execute bash commands over SSH while staying in interactive mode afterwards

A solution based on Gilles's that doesn't require adding AcceptEnv on the server for LC_XXX:

ssh -t remote.example.com "
  exec bash --rcfile <(
    printf '%s\n' '$(
      sed "s:':'\\\\'':g" ~/.bashrc
    )'
  )
"

That's to use your local ~/.bashrc in the remote session. It takes advantage of the fact that everything in between single-quotes in bash is taken literally, so the only thing we need to worry about escaping are the inner single quotes themselves. We can safely quote bash-code by surrounding it with ', and substituting inner 's for '\''s.

If you want to add just a few aliases or something inline to the remote ~/.bashrc:

ssh -t remote.example.com "
  exec bash --rcfile <(
    printf '%s\n' '
      . ~/.bashrc
      alias ll=\"ls -l\"
    '
  )
"

Bash – Can ‘ssh ‘ be configured to always load server-side startup files

Create a wrapper shell function sshc which prefixes the source ~/.bash_profile boiler plate for you:

function sshc {
    local host=$1
    local cmd=$2

    ssh $host "source ~/.bash_profile && $cmd"
}

You can then use this as:

$ sshc localhost 'which perl'
/home/calid/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.20.1/bin/perl

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – Execute bash commands over SSH while staying in interactive mode afterwards

Bash – Can ‘ssh ‘ be configured to always load server-side startup files

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