Does your ISP drop your connection after a period of inactivity? Do you want to keep it alive all the time? spinner is the solution on Linux! spinner is particularly useful in the following situations:

A remote telnet or ssh connection that drops due to inactivity

ISP drops connection after a while

Spinner shows a spinning dash in the top left corner of the terminal. It runs as a daemon and you can change the priority.

To install spinner on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install spinner

Spinner takes the interval in seconds. The regular usage is:

$ spinner n where, n = number of seconds between consecutive data transfers

There’s a better alternative specifically for SSH connections. Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config:

Host * TCPKeepAlive yes ServerAliveInterval 60

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