Extended SSH

An ssh wrapper that transfers functions and aliases to the remote machine without littering and creating additional files.

Features

• Transfer defined functions to remote machine
• Transfer defined aliases to remote machine
• User instructions for old bash versions
• Carry the functions and aliases when using multiple hops
• Execute functions with esudo <functionx> [args]

Limitations

• On remote versions of bash that are earlier than 4, there is a bug that prevents sourcing non-regular files and using them with the --rcfile option. For this reason, the user is instructed how to perform the initialization.
• Running an interactive shell through sudo does not carry the functions.
• The function currently does not support commands or distinguishing them and will act unpredictably if provided with anything other than ssh options. If you need to specify a command to be executed on the remote end, use ssh instead as essh is only useful for interactive sessions. This is now implemented and functions can be used as commands directly: essh host int2bin 123

Usage

Source the script in your bashrc file and define the ESSH_FUNCTIONS and ESSH_ALIASES to list the items you want defined at the remote end. Do not include any of the essh functions; they are included by default and hopping via several nodes will work out of the box.

ESSH_FUNCTIONS="bin2int int2bin sshrm ts ts2"
ESSH_ALIASES="chn gtree srsync wget openports"

. essh/essh.sh

Then you can login to the remote machine by just running:

essh remote

At this stage, you will have all the listed functions on the remote end.

All ssh options are supported.

Versions earlier than Bash 4

In case of running a version that has the pipe sourcing bug, a message will be displayed upon login instructing you to run the following:

eval "$init"

After this manual intervention, the behavior is the same.