I want to be able to send signals (SIGINT is the most important) through ssh.

This command:

ssh server "sleep 1000;echo f" > foo

will start sleep on server and after 1000 seconds it will put 'f\n' in the file foo on my local machine. If I press CTRL-C (i.e. send SIGINT to ssh) it will kill ssh, but it will not kill sleep on the remote server. I want it to kill sleep on the remote server.

So I tried:

ssh server -t "sleep 1000;echo f" > foo

But if stdin is not a terminal I get this error:

Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.

and then SIGINT is still not forwarded.

So I tried:

ssh server -t -t "sleep 1000;echo f" > output

But then the output in foo is not 'f\n' but instead 'f\r\n' which is disastrous in my situation (as my output is binary data).

I really do not care about getting a pseudo-terminal at the other end, but I have been unable to find any other way of getting ssh to forward my SIGINT.

Is there another way?