SSH Term dimensions

[andreas-globi]

I use Pet a lot to execute commands on remote servers.

One thing I'm struggling with is commands that display info.

One of my often-used commands is to watch an apache process list on a remote server, eg:

ssh user@server
watch -n 1 -t 'apachectl fullstatus | grep -w "GET\|POST"'

I managed to get it to work in a one-liner as:

ssh user@server "TERM=xterm COLUMNS=$(tput cols) watch -n 1 -t 'apachectl fullstatus | grep -w \"GET\|POST\"'"

The issue I'm running into is that when I run this via Pet, the result does not get the correct screen dimensions and seems stuck in a 80x25 window.

If I run the command directly on the command line, I get the correct current number of columns.

Problem 1: How can I get the columns to adjust when using Pet?

Problem 2: How can I get the rows to adjust?

[RamiAwar]

How do you use pet to execute the commands exactly? Do you use the ZSH function or pet exec for example?

[andreas-globi]

I use pet exec

[RamiAwar]

Okay that's what I thought.

So what happens when you use pet exec is that pet uses a subshell to run your commands.

This forces a few things:

• Your shell history does not register those commands - it only registers pet exec
• You don't have much control over the subshell. You can choose what shell you use (ex. zsh) and a few other things, but not total control.

This is especially important for when you're logging into SSH servers and doing such things.

I recommend you follow this section https://github.com/knqyf263/pet?tab=readme-ov-file#select-snippets-at-the-current-line-like-c-r-recommended and set up pet as follows.

Then you will be using pet only to select the snippet, and have it copied/pasted into your current shell. Then you can press enter to run it yourself from a shell you control fully!

That will solve the problem for you. @andreas-globi