Some Unix commands fail with ” not found”, when executed using Python Paramiko exec_command

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The SSHClient.exec_command by default does not run shell in “login” mode and does not allocate a pseudo terminal for the session. As a consequence a different set of startup scripts is (might be) sourced, than in your regular interactive SSH session (particularly for non-interactive sessions, .bash_profile is not sourced). And/or different branches in the scripts are taken, based on an absence/presence of TERM environment variable.

Possible solutions (in preference order):

  1. Fix the command not to rely on a specific environment. Use a full path to sesu in the command. E.g.:

    /bin/sesu test

    If you do not know the full path, on common *nix systems, you can use which sesu command in your interactive SSH session.

  2. Fix your startup scripts to set the PATH the same for both interactive and non-interactive sessions.

  3. Try running the script explicitly via login shell (use --login switch with common *nix shells):

    bash --login -c "sesu test"

  4. If the command itself relies on a specific environment setup and you cannot fix the startup scripts, you can change the environment in the command itself. Syntax for that depends on the remote system and/or the shell. In common *nix systems, this works:

    PATH="$PATH;/path/to/sesu" && sesu test

  5. Another (not recommended) approach is to force the pseudo terminal allocation for the “exec” channel using the get_pty parameter:

    stdin,stdout,stderr = ssh.exec_command('sesu test', get_pty=True)

    Using the pseudo terminal to automate a command execution can bring you nasty side effects. See for example Is there a simple way to get rid of junk values that come when you SSH using Python’s Paramiko library and fetch output from CLI of a remote machine?

You may have a similar problem with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and locating shared objects.

See also:

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