How to confuse ssh

I'm sure there are lots of ways to confuse ssh, just like there lots of ways to confuse me. But this is the one i found.

At work we run Solaris with lots of old tools. I end up building lots of new stuff for my self and then having to work around the old ones. When I worked in a Irix shop, I had to do the same thing but for different reasons.

One of the oddities that I run into is that our login shells are often csh. I like bash or ksh in a pinch. Well this means that I had to hack together a .cshrc that checks for bash and then execs it, leaving me with a perfect world of bash.

It looks something like this:

if ( $_ == "/bin/which" || $_ == "/usr/bin/which" ) then
set which="true"
endif

set BASH = "$PWD/bin/bash"

if ( -x $BASH && $which != "true" ) then
exec $BASH
endif

set BASH = "/usr/bin/bash"

if ( -x $BASH && $which != "true" ) then
exec $BASH
endif
Well ssh does not like this for executing remove commands. When a login shell does that it confuses remove commands but not the remove login one.

For example running: ssh removeserver date would just hang. The debugging output would even say: debug1: Sending command: date then just stop. Unless you add the -t option then it would drop you into a shell.

Very confusing and frustrating, especially when mixed with ProxyCommand and netcat which just does nothing. Or running ssh -t remoteserver ssh nextserver which just drops into a shell on the remoteserver. Then hair pulling occurs :)

I updated to exit before running the bash shell for certain hosts:
if ( `hostname` == 'remoteserver' ) then
exit
endif
Lets just say that it made my afternoon quite unpleasant until I found the solution.

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