Preferred way to terminate `ssh -N` in background using bash? - bash

I've started ssh -N <somehost> & in a bash script (to create a tunnel), and the connection persists after the script ends, and I see with ps that the ssh process has detached.
I am currently killing the background job with kill jobs -p, but is there a better way to do that?

Do you manually end your script?
if so:
Try to catch the QUIT signal (or others) inside your script (use the
trap builtin command I think). Then kill ssh.
else:
Kill ssh at the end of your script.

Related

Bash script that will survive disconnection, but not user break

I want to write a bash script that will continue to run if the user is disconnected, but can be aborted if the user presses Ctrl+C.
I can solve the first part of it like this:
#!/bin/bash
cmd='
#commands here, avoiding single quotes...
'
nohup bash -c "$cmd" &
tail -f nohup.out
But pressing Ctrl+C obviously just kills the tail process, not the main body. Can I have both? Maybe using Screen?
I want to write a bash script that will continue to run if the user is disconnected, but can be aborted if the user presses Ctrl+C.
I think this is exactly the answer on the question you formulated, this one without screen:
#!/bin/bash
cmd=`cat <<EOF
# commands here
EOF
`
nohup bash -c "$cmd" &
# store the process id of the nohup process in a variable
CHPID=$!
# whenever ctrl-c is pressed, kill the nohup process before exiting
trap "kill -9 $CHPID" INT
tail -f nohup.out
Note however that nohup is not reliable. When the invoking user logs out, chances are that nohup also quits immediately. In that case disown works better.
bash -c "$cmd" &
CHPID=$!
disown
This is probably the simplest form using screen:
screen -S SOMENAME script.sh
Then, if you get disconnected, on reconnection simply run:
screen -r SOMENAME
Ctrl+C should continue to work as expected
Fact 1: When a terminal (xterm for example) gets closed, the shell is supposed to send a SIGHUP ("hangup") to any processes running in it. This harkens back to the days of analog modems, when a program needed to clean up after itself if mom happened to pick up the phone while you were online. The signal could be trapped, so that a special function could do the cleanup (close files, remove temporary junk, etc). The concept of "losing your connection" still exists even though we use sockets and SSH tunnels instead of analog modems. (Concepts don't change; all that changes is the technology we use to implement them.)
Fact 2: The effect of Ctrl-C depends on your terminal settings. Normally, it will send a SIGINT, but you can check by running stty -a in your shell and looking for "intr".
You can use these facts to your advantage, using bash's trap command. For example try running this in a window, then press Ctrl-C and check the contents of /tmp/trapped. Then run it again, close the window, and again check the contents of /tmp/trapped:
#!/bin/bash
trap "echo 'one' > /tmp/trapped" 1
trap "echo 'two' > /tmp/trapped" 2
echo "Waiting..."
sleep 300000
For information on signals, you should be able to man signal (FreeBSD or OSX) or man 7 signal (Linux).
(For bonus points: See how I numbered my facts? Do you understand why?)
So ... to your question. To "survive" disconnection, you want to specify behaviour that will be run when your script traps SIGHUP.
(Bonus question #2: Now do you understand where nohup gets its name?)

How do I write a watchdog daemon in bash?

I want a way to write a daemon in a shell script, which runs another application in a loop, restarting it if it dies.
When run using ./myscript.sh from an SSH session, it shall launch a new instance of the daemon, except if the daemon is already running.
When the SSH session ends, the daemon shall persist.
There shall be a parameter (./myscript -stop) that kills any existing daemon.
(Notes on edit - The original question specified that nohup and similar tools may not be used. This artificial requirement was an "XY question", and the accepted answer in fact uses all the tools the OP claimed were not possible to use.)
Based on clarifications in comments, what you actually want is a daemon process that keeps a child running, relaunching it whenever it exits. You want a way to type "./myscript.sh" in an ssh session and have the daemon started.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
PIDFILE=~/.mydaemon.pid
if [ x"$1" = x-daemon ]; then
if test -f "$PIDFILE"; then exit; fi
echo $$ > "$PIDFILE"
trap "rm '$PIDFILE'" EXIT SIGTERM
while true; do
#launch your app here
/usr/bin/server-or-whatever &
wait # needed for trap to work
done
elif [ x"$1" = x-stop ]; then
kill `cat "$PIDFILE"`
else
nohup "$0" -daemon
fi
Run the script: it will launch the daemon process for you with nohup. The daemon process is a loop that watches for the child to exit, and relaunches it when it does.
To control the daemon, there's a -stop argument the script can take that will kill the daemon. Look at examples in your system's init scripts for more complete examples with better error checking.
The pid of the most recently "backgrounded" process is stored in $!
$ cat &
[1] 7057
$ echo $!
7057
I am unaware of a fork command in bash. Are you sure bash is the right tool for this job?

Script: SSH command execute and leave shell open, pipe output to file

I would like to execute a ssh command and pipe the output to a file.
In general I would do:
ssh user#ip "command" >> /myfile
the problem is that ssh close the connection once the command is executed, however - my command sends the output to the ssh channel via another programm in the background, therefore I am not receiving the output.
How can I treat ssh to leave my shell open?
cheers
sven
My understanding is that command starts some background process that perhaps will write some output to the terminal later. If command terminates before that the ssh session will be terminated and there will be no terminal for the background program to write to.
One simple and naive solution is to just sleep long enough
ssh user#ip "command; sleep 30m" >> /myfile
A better solution than sleep would be to wait for the background process(es) to finish in some more intelligent way, but that is impossible to say without further details.
Something more powerful than bash would be Python with Paramiko and PyExpect.

How to make ssh to kill remote process when I interrupt ssh itself?

In a bash script I execute a command on a remote machine through ssh. If user breaks the script by pressing Ctrl+C it only stops the script - not even ssh client. Moreover even if I kill ssh client the remote command is still running...
How can make bash to kill local ssh client and remote command invocation on Crtl+c?
A simple script:
#/bin/bash
ssh -n -x root#db-host 'mysqldump db' -r file.sql
Eventual I found a solution like that:
#/bin/bash
ssh -t -x root#db-host 'mysqldump db' -r file.sql
So - I use '-t' instead of '-n'.
Removing '-n', or using different user than root does not help.
When your ssh session ends, your shell will get a SIGHUP. (hang-up signal). You need to make sure it sends that on to all processes started from it. For bash, try shopt -s huponexit; your_command. That may not work, because the man page says huponexit only works for interactive shells.
I remember running into this with users running jobs on my cluster, and whether they had to use nohup or not (to get the opposite behaviour of what you want) but I can't find anything in the bash man page about whether child processes ignore SIGHUP by default. Hopefully huponexit will do the trick. (You could put that shopt in your .bashrc, instead of on the command line, I think.)
Your ssh -t should work, though, since when the connection closes, reads from the terminal will get EOF or an error, and that makes most programs exit.
Do you know what the options you're passing to ssh do? I'm guessing not. The -n option redirects input from /dev/null, so the process you're running on the remote host probably isn't seeing SIGINT from Ctrl-C.
Now, let's talk about how bad an idea it is to allow remote root logins:
It's a really, really bad idea. Have a look at HOWTO: set up ssh keys for some suggestions how to securely manage remote process execution over ssh. If you need to run something with privileges remotely you'll probably want a solution that involves a ssh public key with embedded command and a script that runs as root courtesy of sudo.
trap "some_command" SIGINT
will execute some_command locally when you press Ctrl+C . help trap will tell you about its other options.
Regarding the ssh issue, i don't know much about ssh. Maybe you can make it call ssh -n -x root#db-host 'killall mysqldump' instead of some_command to kill the remote command?
What if you don't want to require using "ssh -t" (for those as forgetful as I am)?
I stumbled upon looking at the parent PID, because CTRL/C from the initiating session results in the ssh-launched process on the remote process exiting, although its child process continues. By way of example, here's my script that is on the remote server.
#!/bin/bash
Answer=(Alive Dead)
Index=0
while [ ${Index} -eq 0 ]; do
if ! kill -0 ${PPID} 2> /dev/null ; then Index=1; fi
echo "Parent PID ${PPID} is ${Answer[$Index]} at $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S%Z)" > ~/NowTime.txt
sleep 1
done
I then invoke it with "ssh remote_server ./test_script.sh"
"watch cat ~/NowTime.txt" on the remote server shows the timestamp in the file increasing and declaring that the parent process is alive; once I hit CTRL/C in the launching process, the script on the remote server notes that its parent process has died, and the script exits.

Run command when bash script is stopped

How can i, in a bash script, execute a command when the user stops the script (with ctrl - c)?
Currently, i have this:
afplay file.mp3
while true:
do osascript -e "set volume 10"
end
But i would like it to execute killall afplay when the user is finished with it, regardless if it is command-c or another keypress.
trap 'killall afplay' EXIT
Use trap.
trap "kill $pid" INT TERM EXIT
Also avoid killall or pkill, since it could kill unrelated processes (for instance, from another instance of your script, or even a different script). Instead, put the player's PID in a variable and kill only that PID.
You need to put a trap statement in your bash script:
trap 'killall afplay' EXIT
Note however that this won't work if the bash process is sent a KILL signal (9) as it's not possible for processes to intercept that signal.

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