10 SSH Tricks That Go Way Beyond ssh user@host

Tunnels, proxies, escape sequences, and the features hiding in a tool you use every day.

Photo by MARCO on Unsplash

SSH is one of the most used developer tools in existence. Most people use it for one thing: getting a shell on a remote machine.

SSH can do significantly more than that. Here are ten features worth knowing — on Mac, Linux, and Windows (via OpenSSH, which ships with Windows 10 and later).

1. Kill a frozen SSH session without closing the terminal

The connection dropped. The remote server is unresponsive. The terminal is frozen — nothing you type does anything, including Ctrl-C.

Press, in sequence:

Enter
~
.

That is: hit Enter, then tilde, then dot. This is SSH’s escape sequence — it tells the SSH client (not the remote shell) to terminate the connection. The terminal returns to normal immediately.

Other escape sequences (all preceded by Enter then ~):

• ~. — disconnect
• ~^Z — suspend SSH to background (like Ctrl-Z on a process)
• ~# — list all open tunnels in this session
• ~? — list all escape sequences