Howto: Stabilizing and upgrading Linux shells

When you manage to get access to a system by the means of a reverse shell, chances are that you want to stabilize your new shell to have a real terminal (tty).

Otherwise you may not be able to do things like using tab completion, use programs like su, etc.

Since this is a process, which requires multiple steps, I’ll note it down here. :)

1. use Python to spawn a new shell:

python3 -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")' 

2. suspend the newly spawned shell by pressing:

CTRL + Z

3. back on your local box, type:

stty size
stty raw -echo; fg

Note down the two numbers (cols and rows) which you got from stty size.

4. on the attacked boy, finally enter:

stty cols NUMBER_OF_COLS rows NUMBER_OF_ROWS
export TERM=xterm-256color

Now you’ve upgraded your shell to a fully interactive TTY!

There are of course many more ways to stabilize a Linux shell, but this works for me. :-)

• Howto
• Linux
• Shell