[ggm]

Why tilde? Because rlogin, rsh used it.

Why did rlogin, rsh use tilde? because cu used it.

Why cu? Because if you had a modem or serial line, cu was the way you talked to it, to send Hayes codes, and you can't use Hayes codes breakouts because they will break to the modem, so you need a signal to break to cu.

Why not ^[ ? Because thats telnet. so if you had telnet to a host, to connect to the modem over cu, you needed a distinct break-back for cu, to not break back to telnet.

Its breakout syntax all the way down.

Also, its not actually tilde, it <cr>tilde

[lost_tourist]

I thought it was CR, tilde, .<dot> ? have i been doing it wrong?

[lmz]

Tilde dot is the disconnect sequence for SSH. Other characters after tilde have other uses as seen in the post.

[raffraffraff]

And if you're N connections, use multiple tildes, depending on how many levels you want to disconnect. I think.

It's amazing how switching jobs to one where you just write terraform and yaml all day gets your terminal skills all rusty.

[maratc]

There's a song about it, it's called "Ctrl up-arrow Q".

[chungy]

The dot command terminates the ssh session. There's a lot more uses for the escape sequence.