How to Ssh Interactive Session

How to start interactive ssh terminal from bash script?

The problem is that you give ssh input from your cat $HOSTS_FILE command instead of from your keyboard. That's why you can't interact with it.

The easiest, ugliest fix is to redirect from the current tty:

ssh -t -l $username $hostname < /dev/tty

Interactive ssh session started from bash command

Input to xargs (and therefore bash and therefore ssh) is coming from the pipe, not your terminal. Depending on the larger context, one of these options should work to let ssh read from the terminal:

Capture the list of hosts to an array first, then use a for loop instead of xargs. Something like this:

 readarray -t hostarray < <(echo "username@host")
 for host in "${hostarray[@]}"; do
     ssh "$host"
 done

Add the -o option to xargs, which tells it to redirect stdin of the command from /dev/tty (i.e. the terminal).
Redirect the regular stdin around the xargs command via a different file descriptor, e.g. #3 (note: I haven't tested this):
```
 { echo "username@host" | xargs -I{} bash -x -c 'ssh -ttt "$0" <&3' {}; } 3<&0
```

BTW, in addition to problems with ssh not getting input it's supposed to get (i.e. from the terminal), you can also have trouble with it stealing input that was intended for something else, like parts of the list of hosts you wanted xargs to read. See BashFAQ #89: I'm reading a file line by line and running ssh or ffmpeg, only the first line gets processed!

Open interactive SSH session from Node script

You can use the ssh2-client package

const ssh = require('ssh2-client');

const HOST = 'junk@localhost';

// Exec commands on remote host over ssh
ssh
  .exec(HOST, 'touch junk')
  .then(() => ssh.exec(HOST, 'ls -l junk'))
  .then((output) => {
    const { out, error } = output;
    console.log(out);
    console.error(error);
  })
  .catch(err => console.error(err));

// Setup a live shell on remote host
ssh
  .shell(HOST)
  .then(() => console.log('Done'))
  .catch(err => console.error(err));

DISCLAIMER : I'm the author of this module

Interactive SSH session using Net::SSH or creating a STDIN Socket

Sockets are really nothing more than file descriptors, and since STDIN is a file descriptor too, it doesn't hurt to try.

What you want however, is to put the TTY into raw mode first to get interactivity.

This code seems to work fine:

begin
  system('stty cbreak -echo')

  Net::SSH.start(...) do |session|
    session.open_channel do |...|
       ...
       session.listen_to(STDIN) { |stdin|
         input = stdin.readpartial(1024)
         channel.send_data(input) unless input.empty?
       }
     end.wait
   end
ensure
  system('stty sane')
end

how to interact with Paramiko's interactive shell session?

I imported a file, interactive.py, found on Paramiko's GitHub. After importing it, I just had to change my code to this:

try:
    import interactive
except ImportError:
    from . import interactive

...
...

channel.invoke_shell()
interactive.interactive_shell(channel)
sshClient.close()