[SOLVED] Strange behavior when running top through ssh

Issue

It's strange that neither

ssh [email protected] bash -c "top"

nor

ssh [email protected] "top"

works as expected, whereas both

ssh [email protected] "ls"  

and

ssh [email protected] bash -c "ls"  

work well.

Here is the error message\output for the former command.

TERM environment variable not set.

I searched and found this post.

As per the said post, there is an answer shed some light on this matter.

You can see if it's really not set. Run the command set | grep TERM. If not, you can set it like that: export TERM=xterm

I tried

ssh [email protected] bash -c "set | grep TERM;top"

, and the output is

TERM=dumb
TERM environment variable not set.

, which is in my expectation.

Then I try to set XTERM as what the post told me, but it does not work. I am stuck again. Here is my command to set XTERM and run top:

ssh [email protected] bash -c "export TERM=xterm-256color; top"

Here is the output for the above command:

declare -x DISPLAY="localhost:13.0"
declare -x LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
declare -x LC_ALL="C"
#...
TERM environment variable not set.

Could somebody shed some light on this matter?

Solution

Try using the -t option to allocate a pseudo-terminal for the ssh session. For example

ssh -t [email protected] top

Answered By - Dmitri Chubarov

Answer Checked By - Mary Flores (WPSolving Volunteer)