[kurthr]

You might also see if you can just restrict interaction to a shell. That's definitely going to be much lower bandwidth (and thus more responsive). Then anything you can do in the shell, you can do through SMS. Updating an 80col screen isn't a completely unreasonable number of messages... especially if you're doing compression.

Security is probably a bigger issue.

[PaulHoule]

Couldn’t that blow up your phone? I could cat a million line file and it would take some time before I could do the equivalent of ctrl-c or close session.

[Spare_account]

The agent running on the remote machine would need to be aware of this issue and filter out long responses.

[kurthr]

Yes, for example, just update the screen no more than once every few seconds. With no compression you can send chained 153 ascii character messages is only 13-14 SMS messages. With any compression, I suspect you could get refresh rates for most commands in less than a second in response to reasonable commands. Unreasonable command responses you could simply ^C or otherwise terminate the script.