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Comment by xtacy | Hacker News Reader

The ssh escape sequence "~" (without quotes) comes in handy at times.

    "~ C" Gives you a ssh command prompt.
              Press ? for help.

    "~ ." Closes the ssh connection; useful for
              unresponsive ssh connections!

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Worth noting that you need a newline before the ~ for it to work.

Another useful tip to know is how to set your own escape key.

    ssh -e ^ example.com

This will set the escape key to ^ instead of ~.

I had to use this recently to terminate an ssh connection that was initiated inside of a screen session on a machine I was sshed into from my laptop. Obviously, the generic ~. killed the first ssh session (on my machine), not the one in the screen. Connecting to the middle machine with ssh -e^ let me send ~. to the proper ssh session.

Instead of changing the escape, you can tap it one more time. So, to drop your 2nd (nested) connection: ~ ~ .

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