How To Unfreeze Frozen SSH Tabs In Mac Terminal App

I use the Mac Terminal App a lot to ssh into remote servers. It all works great except for a single annoyance. If I leave the ssh tab open without any activity for sometime or put my Mac to sleep, then the tab gets frozen and becomes unresponsive. It takes a couple of minutes for it to log out of the server and become responsive again, so that I can reuse the tab again.

Whenever this happens, I have to close the unresponsive tab and open a new one, or wait for 5-10 minutes. I did some research about it and found that Mac Terminal App provides an escape command that can be used to forcefully log out of the remote server. All you need to do is to type the following command in the unresponsive tab.

~.

(Tilda followed by a dot)

I tried it and it works like a charm. It immediately logs you out of the frozen ssh tab and you can reuse your tab again without waiting for it to become responsive again.

Hope this small trick is useful for others as well 🙂

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