How can I run tmux commands on an aws machine from a single ssh command on my local machine?

Question

If I run:

ssh -i permissions_file.pem -t ubuntu@<AWS_Public_IP> 'bash run_tmux_experiment.sh'

Nothing runs on the aws machine. I tmux ls and no server is running. If I ssh into this machine and then run "bash run_tmux_experiment.sh" then it works.

For a little more info, here is approximately what run_tmux_experiment.sh looks like:

#!/bin/bash tmux \\ new-session "python long_expirement.py" detach-client

Answer 1

You should post more detailed information about from which system are you connecting (would differ from windows (yes it has ssh.exe) and unix based OS).

For sake of simplicity I presume you are connecting from Unix based OS:

To run a bash script you don't need to specify the shell. The user ubuntu should have it as set default shell.

To specify default shell you can do: it in these ways:

• run sudo chsh -s /bin/bash ubuntu
• edit .bashrc
• edit /etc/passwd (after the last : enter your shell as :/bin/bash
  eg root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash

Now to your actual issue:

You can run it multiple ways. I'll post only 2 in my eyes the best ones:

• run local script on remote machine - no need to actually manually upload the script (note: no need to setup the default shell then):
  ssh -i permissions_file.pem -t ubuntu@AWS_Public_IP 'bash -s' < /your/local/path/run_tmux_experiment.sh

• if you still want to run the remote script you can do it the following way:
  ssh -i permissions_file.pem -t ubuntu@AWS_Public_IP './remote/path/foo.sh'