Can I ssh somewhere, run some commands, and then leave myself a prompt?

Question

I find myself needing to log into various servers, set environment variables, and then work interactively.

e.g.

$ ssh anvil
jla@anvil$ export V=hello         


        

Answer 1

Probably the simplest thing is:

$ ssh -t host 'cmd1; cmd2; sh -i'

If you want to set variables, do:

$ ssh -t host 'cmd1; cmd2; FOO=hello sh -i'

Note that this is a terrible hack, and you would be much better off putting your desired initial commands in a script and doing:

$ scp setup host:~
$ ssh host
host$ . setup