Assuming you have your AWS CLI configured properly, and have the “jq” package installed, this is an easy way to SSH to your EC2 instances, and can detect/start an EC2 instance if you attempt to SSH to one that is stopped.

Place the below in ~/.profile, and then source it with “. ~/.profile” (or close and reopen your terminal):

alias ec2start="aws ec2 start-instances --instance-ids"
alias ec2stop="aws ec2 stop-instances --instance-ids"
alias ec2reboot="aws ec2 reboot-instances --instance-ids"
alias ec2list="aws ec2 describe-instances --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].{Name:[Tags[?Key=='Name'].Value][0][0],PublicIP:PublicIpAddress,PrivateIP:PrivateIpAddress,InstanceID:InstanceId,State:State.Name,AZ:Placement.AvailabilityZone }' --output table"
 alias ec2idlist="aws ec2 describe-instances | jq '.Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId' | sed -E 's/\"//g'"
 ec2ssh(){
     STATE=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids "${1}" | jq '.Reservations | .[].Instances | .[].State | .Name' | sed -E 's/"//g')
     IP=$(aws ec2 describe-instances --instance-ids "${1}" | awk '/PublicIpAddress/ {print $NF}' | sed -E 's/(,|")//g')
     if [ "${STATE}x" == "runningx" ]; then
         if [ "${IP}x" != "x" ]; then
             echo "ssh to: ${IP}"
             ssh -tt -i ~/Downloads/mmoldvan.pem ec2-user@"${IP}" $2
         else
             echo "Instance ${1} does not have a public IP!"
         fi
     elif [ "${STATE}x" == "terminatedx" ]; then
         echo "Instance ${1} has been terminated.  Can't do anything else with it, sorry!"
     elif [ "${STATE}x" == "pendingx" ]; then
         echo "Instance ${1} has a state of ${STATE}.  Wait for it to start? (Y or N): "
         read RESPONSE
         case "${RESPONSE}" in
             Y|y)
                 echo "Trying to SSH to ${IP} with a timeout of 5 seconds…"
                         ssh -tt -o ConnectTimeout=1 -i ~/Downloads/mmoldvan.pem ec2-user@"${IP}" $2
                 while [ $? -ne 0 ]; do
                     sleep 5
                             ssh -tt -o ConnectTimeout=1 -i ~/Downloads/mmoldvan.pem ec2-user@"${IP}" $2
                 done
         esac
     else
         echo "Instance ${1} has a state of ${STATE}.  Would you like to start it? (Y or N): "
         read RESPONSE
         case "${RESPONSE}" in
             Y|y)
                 echo "Starting ${1}…"
                 ec2start $1
                 ec2ssh $1
                 ;;
         esac
     fi
 }

A somewhat useful use case:

Write a for loop to stop all EC2 instances:

for INSTANCE in $(ec2list); do
    ec2stop "${INSTANCE}"
done