Executing commands via ssh does not work

[pnadon]

Describe the bug
I was trying to run ssh user@myserver "cd /boot && ls -l" , but would get the following error: bash: line 64: exec: cd: not found.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. ssh user@myserver "cd /boot && ls -l" (user@myserver being a remote linux server)
2. resulting error: bash: line 64: exec: cd: not found

Environment details
MacOS 11.3.1 Big Sur

Darwin Phils-MacBook-Pro-2.local 20.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 20.4.0: Thu Apr 22 21:46:47 PDT 2021; root:xnu-7195.101.2~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
ProductName:	macOS ProductVersion:	11.3.1 BuildVersion:	20E241
Loaded config files: /Users/philippenadon/.config/kitty/kitty.conf

Config options different from defaults:
allow_remote_control y
enable_audio_bell    False
font_family          Fira Code
font_size            13.0

Additional context

Try to reproduce the problem with kitty --config NONE

• Still produces the same problem.

I also already had this set in my ~/.zshrc, which I believe was supposed to help with using ssh:

if [[ "$TERM" = "xterm-kitty" ]]; then
  alias ssh="kitty +kitten ssh"
fi

Alas, I encountered the issue regardless of if this was set...

I tried searching for existing issues that mentioned this issue, but could not find any. Please let me know if I overlooked something.

[pnadon]

Running the exact same command in the default terminal app worked successfully.

[kovidgoyal]

The terminal has nothing to do with how ssh operates.

[kovidgoyal]

And just for reference, if you want to cd and run something, the way to
do it is

ssh whatever sh -c "cd /wherever && run whatever"

[martinetd]

ssh whatever "cd /foo && ls" does work.
It's the ssh kitten that breaks it by prepending exec so the command ultimately becomes exec cd /foo && ls which doesn't work as cd is a shell built-in (and even if it did work, ls would never be executed anyway)

To be strictly correct it should look for the default shell as it currently does and interpret arguments with it, I guess... But for non-interactive command there really is no advantage to using the ssh kitten so best advice would probably to not setup the alias and only run it when needed

[pnadon]

Ah that clears things up for me, thank you both for answering.

[kovidgoyal]

Ah wasnt clear to me the issue was with the ssh kitten, the original post said the issue occurred with or without the ssh kitten aliases to ssh.