Internet is an issue for me, so I try to disconnect it when not needed. But I from time to time need to open multiple terminals and connect to a remote server and run commands there. As the internet is disconnected, the remote connections to the server are also lost. I need to manually establish all the remote connections and cd to the right directories and execute the last command to keep up with my work. So, my question is, is there a way to write a script which goes through each terminal, execute commands on the remote server to print out the default directories and the last command executed on that terminal? Or, do you have other suggestions to help me control myself on internet?

You might consider running a terminal multiplexer like tmux on your remote machines. Then when you re-attach you will re-join your session in progress.

There are other possibilities too. You can load the SSH command, along with all the options, into .desktop files and then launch everything with a click.

Can you give more detais about your work flow?

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Sounds like instead of disabling your network connection, you should cause your router to stop allowing internet access. Then you won't have this problem of attaching to your server.

This is all presuming that the server is located in the same local network, and also that this is a network which you own.

to Turbocapitalist: that's a great idea, I just checked tmux was not installed on the remote server. If to use tmux to achieve the goal, does it need admin's privilege or can it be my user installation?

to rtmistler: unfortunately, it is not within the same local network.

i heard that for sketchy internet connections, mosh can be a good replacement for ssh.
always meant to try it, never did, now i don't need it anymore...

I might work on different tasks and open different number of terminals each time for an extended number of days. Whenever internet gets interrupted, I need to reset the internet and reopen all the terminals, ssh to the intended remote servers and then go to the former directories and run the latest command there.

The intended operation in my mind is to run a script to collect all the directories and latest command on each terminal on a specific remote server, rewrite these information into a script and save it. Next time, I run the script once and all the sessions are restored in one click/return.

forgot to add:
it survives connections that get interrupted.

Your system administrator can install tmux on the remote machine and then any account there on the machine can use it.

If you need shortcuts, the while loop above can be made into a shell function and then invoked with just a single command.

That example could then be invoke with just entering "server01" into the shell. See "man bash" and scroll way, way, way down to the section "Shell Function Definitions"

Or do the terminal programs on the machine you are connecting from get closed too? Those would be xterm, xfce4-terminal, guake, gnome-terminal, terminator, konsole, or any of the others. If those are closing too, then the script can still open them and launch an SSH session to use tmux on the remote machine. For that you could have a loop and inside that a loop to check for network connectivity and then after that loop it would fire up all the terminals using using the --title and --execute options.

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Actually, the administrator disallowed installing tmux, thus I might not have access to the convenience of this software. Can you introduce script based method?

If the server is properly set up it will have a termnal multiplexor. Maybe screen is there instead of tmux.

However, tmux is part of the set of basic packages in many server distros and even some other operating systems. For example it is part of OpenBSD's base, if that means anything to you.

The system administrator's job is to help you do your job so I would try again and find out what impediment needs to be cleared to get it in place. Obviously they would not let you install it but they definitely should install it. Or are you dealing with M$ resellers posing as IT people? I've run into those a lot and they'll argue in not so many words that they don't know how to install software. Whatever. Be diplomatic. Maybe

As for wasting time and effort on trying to achieve something similar from the client side, it could go a little like this:

However, that will not rejoin your session in progress. That will simply make a new connection and re-run all the commands each time the network connection is re-established.

@Turbocapitalist Thanks for your help, I think the admin simply doesn't want too many dead/unattended sessions to hang around on the head node. The cluster is mainly for computation purpose, thus rapid head-node response is required. Also security is their priority concerns.

Sending command to serve via ssh while establishing new connection seems to work fine, but how about running a script on one terminal to access other terminals which already have remote connections established to print out the current directories and latest commands executed there?

That sounds a bit more complicated to solve. Do you mean that you wish to go back and capture the output of commands that have already run? It might be easier to capture the session before running the commands and then filter out what you don't need. Can you explain the task a little more?

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I have opened a sequence of terminals to work on. I am then afraid of unexpected interruption in internet connection, so I would like to save a copy of the current status of all the terminals and save them into a script file so that if an interruption did happen, I can restore my working status by running the script in a terminal of my local machine. This could save me efforts to open multiple terminals again, ssh to the remote machine and go to the intended directories.

I agree so far with Turbocapitalist's recommendations.

Just to be 100% sure: you're opening "many" ssh sessions to run multiple commands/programs on only 1 host (not to run the same program on many hosts), right?
If this is correct then I cannot think of anything else => maybe it would be worth trying to get management permission to install "tmux" or a similar tool by stating how many hours of work you would save by having it... .

Yes, that's the way I am doing now. Since Turbocapitalist and you have strongly recommended tmux, I have written an email specifically requesting installing it there. Let's see what is the admin's response.