How to send SIGINT to a remote process over SSH?

ssh signals sigint
Matt picture Matt · Oct 3, 2009 · Viewed 15.2k times · Source

I have a program running on a remote machine which expects to receive SIGINT from the parent. That program needs to receive that signal to function correctly. Unfortunately, if I run that process remotely over SSH and send SIGINT, the ssh process itself traps and interrupts rather than forwarding the signal.

Here's an example of this behavior using GDB:

Running locally:

$ gdb
GNU gdb 6.3.50-20050815 (Apple version gdb-1344) (Fri Jul  3 01:19:56 UTC 2009)
...
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-apple-darwin".
^C
(gdb) Quit
^C
(gdb) Quit
^C
(gdb) Quit

Running remotely:

$ ssh foo.bar.com gdb
GNU gdb Red Hat Linux (6.3.0.0-1.159.el4rh)
...
This GDB was configured as "i386-redhat-linux-gnu".
(gdb) ^C
Killed by signal 2.
$

Can anybody suggest a way of working around this problem? The local ssh client is OpenSSH_5.2p1.

Answer

ephemient picture ephemient · Oct 3, 2009 
$ ssh -t foo.bar.com gdb
...
(gdb) ^C
Quit

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