View captcha on Linux over SSH fails

[kriation]

Recently, I noticed that when connected remotely to a Linux host via SSH where I run aws-google-auth, when Image.open(f).show() is called, an infinite loop is entered where xdg-open is called repeatedly. This is caused when a proper file handler for the captcha PNG is not configured (or not available as DISPLAY is not set).

The error captured during this loop is the following:
/usr/bin/xdg-open /tmp/lynxXXXX87c10H/L4113285-3805TMP.png lynx: Start file could not be found or is not text/html or text/plain Exiting... /usr/bin/xdg-open: line 881: w3m: command not found xdg-open: no method available for opening '/tmp/tmpnlg39suq.PNG'