Howto run and execute a command using SSH on a remote machine

Posted by: Mohammed Semari | Published: September 9, 2016| Updated: September 9, 2016

In this mini post, I’ll show you how to run and execute a command using ssh under UNIX, OS X, *BSD, and Linux operating systems on a remote machine. The SSH client program can be used for logging into a remote machine or server and for executing commands on a remote machine without logging into the remote server. When a command is specified, it is executed on the remote host/server instead of a login shell. The syntax is as follows for executing commands over ssh:

ssh user@<remote_server> 'command1'
ssh user@<remote_server> 'command2'
ssh user@<remote_server> 'command1 | command2'

Replace the user with the existing user on the remote server and replace the <remote_server> with your server IP or fqdn hostname. The ssh client will login to the remote server and run the command you specified.

Here’s some examples on running commands over ssh:

Get remote server date and time:

ssh user@remote_server date

Find out remote server disk space usage:

ssh user@remote_server 'df -H'

Find out remote server kernel version and Linux distro names:

ssh user@remote_server 'uname -mrs'

ssh user@remote_server 'lsb_release -a'

Run a remote script called /scripts/backup.sh to perform backup:

ssh user@remote_server '/scripts/backup.sh'

Here, the backup script must exist on the remote server and is executable, we must use the full path of the remote script.

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