Killing SSH

HOWTO: Kill an SSH Session

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).

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