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An SSH adventure; or, why l10n support is important (gitlab.com)
jmholla 6 days ago [-]
This article has an asterisk on the title.

> (* not actually why l10n support is important)

I'm honestly not sure why it's included in the title there at all. There really is no talk about localization in the document.

This article is about custom bash and vim configurations when SSHing into a machine. The roadblocks the author runs into aren't too surprising to anyone that has a fairly deep understanding of SSH, bash, and Linux processes, but a worthwhile read for more novice users.

For the more advanced, I think the tone can get a little weird, with the author expecting behaviors that don't make sense. But, they do quickly realize why their expectations were not met.

There is one point where they didn't explain what was going on. When they attempted

    echo 'alias puppet_="sudo puppet agent --test"' > custom-bashrc
    ssh -t secret-abc123.1d6.org "bash --rcfile <( echo '"$(cat custom-bashrc)"' )"

The issue here was the shell's invocation of echo losing the quotes in their file. One option, assuming both ends have `base64`, is to reencode the file.

    ssh -t secret-abc123.1d6.org "bash --rcfile <( echo '"$(base64 bashrc)"' | base64 -d )"
There might also be some sed invocation that can properly escape everything, but I think I'm good on spending any more time on this.

Also, there is a commenter trying out a few other successful "file smuggles" that are worth a gander. (My favorite is their usage of environment variables locally to bypassing the shell's "removal" of quotes.)

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