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dotancohen
Asked: 2014-10-07 01:41:45 +0800 CST

How to remotely list a directory in the configured user's home directory

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I notice that when doing one-liners via ssh into a Linux server, the value of ~ remains the value of the local user's home directory, not the remote user's home directory. Witness local user dotancohen and remote user atwood:

$ whoami
dotancohen

$ ssh beta whoami
atwood

$ ssh beta ls ~/.ssh
ls: cannot access /home/dotancohen/.ssh: No such file or directory

$ ssh beta ls $HOME/.ssh
ls: cannot access /home/dotancohen/.ssh: No such file or directory

$ ssh atwood@beta ls ~/.ssh
ls: cannot access /home/dotancohen/.ssh: No such file or directory

$ ssh beta ls /home/atwood/.ssh
authorized_keys

$ ssh beta ls .ssh             
authorized_keys

Note that even specifying the username in the connection details, and even using $HOME in place of ~ did not help. Not that I expected them to, but it was worth trying.

I have no problem looking in .ssh/config for the username when I'm doing one-liners if need be, but the inability to use ~ in scripts is rather inconvenient. Other than parsing ~/.ssh/config for the username, is there any way around this limitation? The last example shows that I can assume that we're in his home directory and reference things relative to that, but I would prefer to explicitly call the directory if possible.

How can I reference the user's home directory via SSH oneliners, without parsing ~/.ssh/config locally for it?

Tested on local system Kubuntu 14.04 and remote systems Ubuntu Server 12.04, 14.04, and RHEL 6.5.

ssh

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You just need to escape it so that your local shell doesn't expand it: 

     ssh beta ls \~/.ssh

    or 

    ssh beta 'ls ~/.ssh'

    That should work.

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