How can I ssh directly to a particular directory?

Question

I often have to login to one of several servers and go to one of several directories on those machines. Currently I do something of this sort:

localhost ~]$ ssh somehost

Welcome to somehost!

somehost ~]$ cd /some/directory/somewhere/named/Foo
somehost Foo]$ 

I have scripts that can determine which host and which directory I need to get into but I cannot figure out a way to do this:

localhost ~]$ go_to_dir Foo

Welcome to somehost!

somehost Foo]$

Is there an easy, clever or any way to do this?

Answer 1

In my very specific case, I just wanted to execute a command in a remote host, inside a specific directory from a Jenkins slave machine:

ssh myuser@mydomain
cd /home/myuser/somedir 
./commandThatMustBeRunInside_somedir
exit

But my machine couldn't perform the ssh (it couldn't allocate a pseudo-tty I suppose) and kept me giving the following error:

Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal

I could get around this issue passing "cd to dir + my command" as a parameter of the ssh command (to not have to allocate a Pseudo-terminal) and by passing the option -T to explicitly tell to the ssh command that I didn't need pseudo-terminal allocation.

ssh -T myuser@mydomain "cd /home/myuser/somedir; ./commandThatMustBeRunInside_somedir"

Answer 2

You could add

cd /some/directory/somewhere/named/Foo

to your .bashrc file (or .profile or whatever you call it) at the other host. That way, no matter what you do or where you ssh from, whenever you log onto that server, it will cd to the proper directory for you, and all you have to do is use ssh like normal.

Of curse, rogeriopvl's solution works too, but it's a tad bit more verbose, and you have to remember to do it every time (unless you make an alias) so it seems a bit less "fun".

Answer 3

I've created a tool to SSH and CD into a server consecutively – aptly named sshcd. For the example you've given, you'd simply use:

sshcd somehost:/some/directory/somewhere/named/Foo

Let me know if you have any questions or problems!

Answer 4

You can do the following:

ssh -t xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx "cd /directory_wanted ; bash"

This way, you will get a shell right on the directory_wanted.

---

Explanation

-t Force pseudo-terminal allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine, which can be very useful, e.g. when implementing menu services.

Multiple -t options force tty allocation, even if ssh has no local tty.

• If you don't use -t then no prompt will appear.
• If you don't add ; bash then the connection will get closed and return control to your local machine

Answer 5

SSH itself provides a means of communication, it does not know anything about directories. Since you can specify which remote command to execute (this is - by default - your shell), I'd start there.

Answer 6

Based on additions to @rogeriopvl's answer, I suggest the following:

ssh -t xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx "cd /directory_wanted && bash"

Chaining commands by && will make the next command run only when the previous one was successful (as opposed to using ;, which executes commands sequentially). This is particularly useful when needing to cd to a directory performing the command.

Imagine doing the following:

/home/me$ cd /usr/share/teminal; rm -R *

The directory teminal doesn't exist, which causes you to stay in the home directory and remove all the files in there with the following command.

If you use &&:

/home/me$ cd /usr/share/teminal && rm -R *

The command will fail after not finding the directory.