Bug 111503

Summary:	Automatically execute commands to prevent connection loss when remotely connected
Product:	[Applications] konsole	Reporter:	Jesús Jiménez <jesjimenez>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Konsole Developer <konsole-devel>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	eljefedelito, le.dahut
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Jesús Jiménez 2005-08-25 18:43:52 UTC

Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.4.0)
Installed from:    Unlisted Binary Package
OS:                Linux

I'm often working with multiple konsole tabs, each one with a ssh session to another machine. One thing that I find very annoying is that, if any of this connections is idle for some time (1 min or so), the connection is lost. It would be nice if konsole could be configured to automatically issue a predefined, useless command (a simple 'ls', 'true', or even a carriage return), when it detects inactivity, just to maintain the connection up. 

This has been done for ages in many FTP clients, and it works very well. Since not every session will understand the same commands, I think a good way to implement this would be adding a "Execute custom command when idle..." option to the right-click popup menu of each tab.

Thanks for your attention and congratulations for such a good little app!

Comment 1 Marijn Schouten 2006-04-28 13:10:17 UTC

why couldn't this be done in the ssh-client? I see no advantages to putting it in konsole.

Comment 2 Jesús Jiménez 2006-04-28 13:16:08 UTC

Because more programs besides ssh could benefit from this feature: ftp, telnet and generally any remote connection has the risk of losing connection when inactive. Of course it would be possible to implement this in every client (and in fact there're quite a few who do), but I think it would be useful to have this in konsole.

Comment 3 Robert Knight 2007-06-02 17:32:39 UTC

*** Bug 146264 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Robert Knight 2007-06-02 17:34:46 UTC

There are command-line tools which do this already, such as spinner ( which displays a little continuously-changing ASCII character at the top of the terminal ).  Is this sufficient for your needs?

Comment 5 Jeffrey 2007-06-04 14:03:52 UTC

I guess it is, but I find it unfortunate!  I wanted to make an argument
about KDE usability and not needing the command line, but i guess it doesn't
apply in this case.

I'll look into Spinner, thanks for the pointer, and the response.
I guess it is, but I find it unfortunate!&nbsp; I wanted to make an argument about KDE usability and not needing the command line, but i guess it doesn&#39;t apply in this case.<br><br>I&#39;ll look into Spinner, thanks for the pointer, and the response.
<br>

Comment 6 Robert Knight 2007-06-08 22:02:13 UTC

Please try spinner and see if it does what you need.  Whether this is worth having in Konsole itself really depends on how many users run into this problem regularly.  If it is a common problem then it might make sense to have such a feature.  If only a small percentage of users encounter it then it is probably better to add a mention in Konsole's documentation and point them towards a utility like spinner.

This is technically not that difficult to implement, if it gets a good number of votes then I would likely include it.

Comment 7 Robert Knight 2008-01-04 00:15:06 UTC

Closing this bug on the basis that there are command-line tools which can be used to solve the problem in conjunction with Konsole.

Comment 8 ledahut 2013-06-26 12:16:30 UTC

spinner no longer exists as command.

It may be a good idea to add this directly into Konsole instead of counting on external command to do the job ?