I am passing a small series of commands to a remote server through ssh. the basic format is:

sshpass -p $password ssh $username@$host -p $port $commands

the commands are passed in the form of a string, like this:

commands="command1; command2; etc..."

this has worked smoothly in previous applications. however, for this one, the first thing i need to do is create a temp directory with mktemp -d and cd into it. i need a oneliner to do this because i wont have “interactive” access in order to manually input commands (this is meant for an automated task).

the issue i’m having is this: either the temp directory is created but CWD doesn’t change, or it isn’t created at all.

any help would be much appreciated. thanks in advance.

i have tried the following:

commands="cd $(mktemp -d)" >> returns “no such file or directory”
commands="TEMP=$(mktemp -d); cd $TEMP" >> looks like $TEMP isn’t created for some reason
commands="cd /tmp; cd $(cat $(mktemp -d > dir.txt))" >> returned nothing