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Say that I have an application running on one PC that is sending commands via SSH to another PC on the network (both machines running Linux).

For example every time something happens on #1, I want to run a task on #2. In this setup, I have to create SSH connection on every single command.

Is there any simple way to do this with basic unix tools without programming custom client/server application? Basically all I want is to establish a connection over SSH and then send one command after another.

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7 Answers 7

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Not sure if it can be used in production but you can do something like this:

create file on #1

1> touch /tmp/commands

Then run command:

1> tail -f /tmp/commands | ssh [email protected]

That will open file /tmp/commands and start sending its content to server x.x.x.x (#2) and run it there line by line

now, every time something happens on #1 do:

1> echo "ls -l" >> /tmp/commands

or

1> echo "reboot" >> /tmp/commands

whatever you add to file /tmp/commands will be sent to #2 and executed. Just make sure you do not run anything interactive, or deal with it somehow.

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  • This is exactly what I've been looking for, very creative solution :) Dec 26, 2010 at 5:57
  • 5
    I'd add that you should use tail -F, which will detect that the file has been replaced, so when it gets to be giant you can erase it and start over with a new file.
    – DerfK
    Dec 26, 2010 at 16:24
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    @DerfK, alternatively, mkfifo /tmp/commands should be a better solution
    – solotim
    Nov 17, 2017 at 11:36
29

Automatic Persistency Using OpenSSH

You can also use the ControlMaster feature of OpenSSH, which opens a unix domain socket for the first connection and reuses this connection in all subsequent calls.

To enable the feature, you can either use -M as the command line switch or enable the ControlMaster option in your ~/.ssh/ssh_config, e.g.:

ControlMaster auto

Additionally, you should set the ControlPath using the following lines in your ~/.ssh/ssh_config:

Host *
   ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p

To maintain a persistent connection to a host, e.g. if you want to run a script which needs to establish many ssh connections to the host, none of which persistent over the whole lifetime of the script, you can start a silent connection in advance using:

ssh -MNf remotehost

Cheerio, nesono

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  • I signed into server fault just to +1 vote your answer. Yours worked! Aug 31, 2012 at 10:34
  • ssh -N starts a session without remote command, seems no corresponding options in ssh_config.
    – Jokester
    Mar 16, 2013 at 11:07
  • You may also want to configure ControlPersist 480m (adjust time to preference) to keep the connection alive for some time even after the SSH session has ended, to avoid having to re-enter your password/MFA each time.
    – erwaman
    Jul 3, 2020 at 11:06
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In /etc/ssh/ssh_config add

# Send keep alive signal to remote sshd
ServerAliveInterval 60
2

If you run into this sort of thing a lot, try Parallel. It is like dsh (distributed shell) but has some neat features like counting semaphores and it is actively maintained.

From the documentation:

EXAMPLE: GNU Parallel as queue system/batch manager

GNU Parallel can work as a simple job queue system or batch manager. The idea is to put the jobs into a file and have GNU Parallel read from that continuously. As GNU Parallel will stop at end of file we use tail to continue reading:

echo >jobqueue; tail -f jobqueue | parallel

To submit your jobs to the queue:

echo my_command my_arg >> jobqueue

You can of course use -S to distribute the jobs to remote computers:

echo >jobqueue; tail -f jobqueue | parallel -S ..

There are many great examples that just scratch the surface. Here is a cool one.

EXAMPLE: Distributing work to local and remote computers

Convert *.mp3 to *.ogg running one process per CPU core on local computer and server2:

  parallel --trc {.}.ogg -j+0 -S server2,: \
  'mpg321 -w - {} | oggenc -q0 - -o {.}.ogg' ::: *.mp3
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yes it is possible with a pipe:

echo 'echo "hi"' | ssh -i my_private_key tester@host2

this will execute the command echo "hi" on host2

you just have to write a programm, that just gives out the commands ( don't forget the ; ) and then pipe that output to ssh

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You might want to use program like dsh (Distributed SHell) that is made to do just that :), After configuring it with host names and setting up publickeya auth, you can use it to run commands on multiple machines either in series ("run on machine a then run on machine b") or in pararell ("run on all machines on same time"). Or just make script

#!/bin/sh
ssh machine -- $@
exec $@
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DISCLAIMER: I can't test this right now, as I'm on a windows machine with bash but without ssh.

In a bash script, you can do something like this:

exec 4> >(ssh --ssh-options-here user@host)

And then to send commands, write them to FD 4.

echo 'echo hi' >&4

If you do it this way, you can't access the results of the commands easily, but based on your question it doesn't seem like you need to.

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