shell - Can I ssh somewhere, run some commands, and then leave myself a prompt?

Question

I find myself needing to log into various servers, set environment variables, and then work interactively.

e.g.

$ ssh anvil
jla@anvil$ export V=hello
jla@anvil$ export W=world
jla@anvil$ echo $V $W
hello world

How can I combine the first few commands, and then leave myself at a prompt?

Something like:

$ ssh anvil --on-login 'export V=hello; export W=world;'
jla@anvil$ echo $V $W
hello world

Obviously this is a model problem. What I am really asking is 'how do I ssh to a different machine, run some commands, and then continue as if I'd run them by hand?'

Answer 1

Probably the simplest thing is:

$ ssh -t host 'cmd1; cmd2; sh -i'

If you want to set variables, do:

$ ssh -t host 'cmd1; cmd2; FOO=hello sh -i'

Note that this is a terrible hack, and you would be much better off putting your desired initial commands in a script and doing:

$ scp setup host:~
$ ssh host
host$ . setup