Comments on: How to show ssh host name on the iTerm’s background

By: Andrew McFague

Andrew McFague — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:24:00 +0000

Wait! I realized a mistake; ssh doesn’t always exit with a 0 status, even though it may be a normal exit. To make it a little clearer, the following worked:

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# First, check to see if we have the correct terminal!
if [ "$( tty )" == 'not a tty' ] ; then
/usr/bin/ssh "$@"
exit
fi

By: Dmytro Shteflyuk

Dmytro Shteflyuk — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:48:00 +0000

That’s sweet, thank you! Will test on my machine and update the post. Good work!

By: Andrew McFague

Andrew McFague — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:45:00 +0000

A quick improvement I had to implement when dealing with non-terminal windows (i.e., bash scripts):

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# First, check to see if we have the correct terminal!
[ "$( tty )" == 'not a tty' ] && /usr/bin/ssh "$@" && exit

# Generate dimension based on screensize
H=$((1440 / 178 * `stty size | cut -d ' ' -f2` ))
V=$((900 / 47 * `stty size | cut -d ' ' -f2` ))
DIMENSIONS=$H"x"$V # Console dimensions

This uses the the tty variable to detect whether or not its a terminal session, so it won’t try and grab the screen size from stdin-less sessions. Note, this depends on the tty variable being set which, from my basic testing, works flawlessly on bash-3.2.

Andrew

By: Andrew McFague

Andrew McFague — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:23:00 +0000

I loved this, but the problem is, I use a fullscreen monitor specifically for SSH at work, but I only have my regular laptop screen at home. So, of course, the background would be extremely distorted.

So I came up with the following; this should net you the approximate resolution by converting the rows/columns to a resolution. I simply used the ratio of the columns/rows to the resolution on my laptop:

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# Generate dimension based on screensize
H=$((1440/178*`stty size | cut -d ' ' -f2`))
V=$((900/47*`stty size | cut -d ' ' -f1`))
DIMENSIONS=$H"x"$V

Its not foolproof, but its very dynamic and works great for me! :)

Andrew

By: Doug Vasquez

Doug Vasquez — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:11:00 +0000

Great tip, thanks for sharing!

I did discover an error when attempting to run in snow leopard (v10.6.1):

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Error loading /Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: dlopen(/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types, 262): no suitable image found. Did find:
/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
osascript: OpenScripting.framework - scripting addition "/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax" declares no loadable handlers.

After a quick google search, I ran into a post (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/486208) that suggested prefixing the osascript command with the appropriate supported architecture:

1	arch -i386 osascript ...

So if anyone runs into this issue, just change the following line:

1	osascript -e "tell application \"iTerm\"

with this:

1	arch -i386 osascript -e "tell application \"iTerm\"

By: jujudellago

jujudellago — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:34:00 +0000

Hi,

Thanks a lot for this, that solved problems I had for ages connecting to too many servers….

just a little problem, the background image disapear when I enter full screen (CMD-Enter)

cheers

julien

By: j2

j2 — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:48:00 +0000

This will work better with arguments passed to ssh:

1	HOSTNAME=`echo $@ \| sed 's/.* $.$$/\1/' \| sed "s/.@//"`

e.g. on OSX -Y forwards X11 connections easily, but using your sed expressions the command ssh -Y myhost will result in -Y being the image shown in the background.

Also, you still need to be careful that you are on the host that you logged onto originally from OSX. if you chain your ssh’s your background image will be incorrect.

By: dgs

dgs — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:05:00 +0000

Very cool, that would be so useful in large data centers!!!

By: e0ne

e0ne — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:42:00 +0000

It’s interesting feature. But I think it’s not very useful.