How to Make the OS X Terminal Change Colors for Remote Servers

A thing I have done is attempt to hard shut down my Mac using the shell (e.g. sudo shutdown -r) and accidentally taken down one of our servers that I was ssh'd into.

To fix this and generally have more awareness of what the heck I am doing, I use a .profile script to change the Terminal theme when logging into and out of remote servers via SSH.

echo BashRC

function tabc {

  NAME=$1; if [ -z "$NAME" ]; then NAME="Default"; fi

  osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set current settings of front window to settings set \"$NAME\""

}

function ssh {

  tabc "Pro"

  /usr/bin/ssh "$@"

  tabc "Basic"

}

I am not sure where this comes from - possibly here, but I see a few web references and I don't know which one I originally found. I'm posting it here so that I can find it the next time I get a new machine.

(Redoing this was necessary because I didn't migration-assistant my new laptop, and since it was going to Catalina, that was probably for the best.)

The script goes into ~/.profile for OS X 10.14 and older, or ~/.zprofile for OS X 10.15.