Question

I’m trying to execute a command remotely via SSH from Python, and in this particular case need stdin to be redirected to /dev/null.

That is, the same as using the OpenSSH client with its -n flag:

ssh -n user@host cmd

How do you achieve this (-n) with Paramiko?

paramiko.SSHClient.exec_command() doesn’t seem to allow this, but maybe I’m missing something?

Answer 1

Unless I understand your question incorrectly: you don’t need to achieve this. Nothing is automatically read from stdin/written to the remote process’ stdin unless you yourself explicitly do so. So you don’t need to prevent reading from stdin from happening?

EDIT: there might be an issue if the remote process expects data on stdin, and keeps waiting for it? Try calling shutdown_write() on the channel:

stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command(cmd)
stdin.channel.shutdown_write()