Updated for 2026: This topic is covered in depth in our new guide: The Complete SSH Guide for 2026.
From The Mad Philosopher:
Whenever I login remotely to my machine in Canada, the ssh session dies after a while if I don’t actively type something. This is not the server timing out, but rather the TCP connection hanging. Figuring out a way to keep sending it keystrokes automatically is beyond my ability, but I found out that I could just have it send me data continually, and that works just as well to keep the terminal session alive. The following Bourne Shell loop works:
while date ; do sleep 10 ; done
This just prints the date and time to my terminal every 10 seconds. At any time, I can interrupt it with a CTRL-C and continue to use the session. So now you know.
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