SSH into a machine and then launch an interactive command line program

Question

I would like to actually ssh into a machine (not remotely execute a command like ssh -i key.pem user@host 'bash -s' < script.sh) and then once that is complete run a command to launch an interactive command line program on the remote machine. Any ideas? Note all of this is done in a script and the end result should be a interactive command line program running within the shell on the remote host.

So far I have tried in Python 2.7 on Ubuntu 14.04

import os
os.system("xterm -e ssh -tt -i key.pem -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no ubuntu@ip_address yRouter/src/yrouter --interactive=1 user")

But the xterm session closes immediately after. The "yrouter" is the executable on the remote machine and --interactive=1 user are its arguments.

To clarify: the result after running the Python code above should be an xterm (or any terminal window) open, already sshed into the remote host AND have the interactive command line program yrouter running.

Answer 1

If you pass a command in the arguments ssh runs non-interactively;

$ ssh -t user@localhost echo foo
user@localhost's password: 
foo
Connection to localhost closed.

A solution is to replace the non-interactive shell with an interactive shell in the command passed to ssh:

$ ssh -t user@localhost 'echo foo; exec zsh'
user@localhost's password: 
foo
% 

In your case, to replace the non-interactive shell e.g. with an interactive Bash instance:

import os
os.system("xterm -e ssh -tt -i key.pem -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no ubuntu@ip_address 'yRouter/src/yrouter --interactive=1 user; exec bash'")