Often I’m using SSH and my connection drops, or I close my laptop and it disconnects from the wifi. When I get back to my SSH sessions, its locked and unresponsive. Eventually it will time out, but it takes a while.
Enter: SSH Escape Characters.
They only work immediately after a newline, and all start with a tilde. The disconnect character is the period (or dot).
So all you have to do is:
[enter]~.
And voila, it’ll end your session without kill or closing your terminal.
Here’s a complete list of escape characters from the SSH man page:
. Disconnect.
^Z Background ssh.
# List forwarded connections.
& Background ssh at logout when waiting for forwarded connection / X11 sessions to terminate.
? Display a list of escape characters.
B Send a BREAK to the remote system (only useful for SSH protocol version 2 and if the peer supports it).
C Open command line. Currently this allows the addition of port forwardings using the -L, -R and -D options (see above). It also allows the cancellation of existing remote port-forwardings using -KR[bind_address:]port.
!command allows the user to execute a local command if the PermitLocalCommand option is enabled in ssh_config(5). Basic help is available, using the -h option.
R Request rekeying of the connection (only useful for SSH protocol version 2 and if the peer supports it).
:A