Upgrade to Fully Interactive TTYs #
At a Glance #
More often than not, reverse, or bind shells are shells with limited interactive capabilities. Meaning no job control, no auto-completion, no STDERR output, and, most important, poor signal handling and limited commands support. To fully leverage the shell it is convenient to upgrade to an interactive TTY with extended features.
Note:
To check if the shell is a TTY shell use the tty command.
Shell to Bash #
Upgrade from shell to bash.
SHELL=/bin/bash script -q /dev/null
Python PTY Module 1 #
Spawn /bin/bash using Python’s PTY module, and connect the controlling shell with its standard I/O.
python -c 'import pty; pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'
Fully Interactive TTY #
Background the current remote shell (^Z), update the local terminal line settings with stty2 and bring the remote shell back.
stty raw -echo && fg
After bringing the job back the cursor will be pushed to the left. Reinitialize the terminal with reset.
“Pty — Pseudo-Terminal Utilities.” 3.8.3 Documentation, https://docs.python.org/3/library/pty.html. ↩︎
“Stty.” Linux Manual Page, https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/stty.1.html. ↩︎