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Bash Safety Tip: Check for Terminal Prompt

Ubuntu Tux

I was having a pretty painful issue with SCP the other day and it took me a few hours to get to the bottom of it, but there's a lesson to be learned here. The problem was that I was able to SSH to a host, but was not able to SCP to that same host. The keys were good, the permissions on the key files were good - and SSH was just fine. It was just SCP.

Finally, I figure out it was my .bashrc file. I had added some functions in there, and they were doing fine with a terminal session, but the SCP "head-less" session was causing it to hang. Horribly. And that's the Safety Tip for the day:

Add this after the alias commands at the top of your .bashrc:

  # skip the rest if we're not interactive
  if [ -z "$PS1" ]; then
      return
  fi

and then you'll have the aliases if you need them, but you won't have the rest that could foul up the SCP session.

Very useful tip. Do it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 19th, 2014 at 8:23 am and is filed under Coding, Cube Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.