Bash script to set up a temporary SSH tunnel

You can tell SSH to background itself with the -f option but you won't get the PID with $!. Also instead of having your script sleep an arbitrary amount of time before you use the tunnel, you can use -o ExitOnForwardFailure=yes with -f and SSH will wait for all remote port forwards to be successfully established before placing itself in the background. You can grep the output of ps to get the PID. For example you can use

...
ssh -Cfo ExitOnForwardFailure=yes -N -L 9999:localhost:5900 $REMOTE_HOST
PID=$(pgrep -f 'N -L 9999:')
[ "$PID" ] || exit 1
...

and be pretty sure you're getting the desired PID

You can do this cleanly with an ssh 'control socket'. To talk to an already-running SSH process and get it's pid, kill it etc. Use the 'control socket' (-M for master and -S for socket) as follows:

$ ssh -M -S my-ctrl-socket -fNT -L 50000:localhost:3306 [email protected]
$ ssh -S my-ctrl-socket -O check [email protected]
Master running (pid=3517) 
$ ssh -S my-ctrl-socket -O exit [email protected]
Exit request sent. 

Note that my-ctrl-socket will be an actual file that is created.

I got this info from a very RTFM reply on the OpenSSH mailing list.

• You can tell ssh to go into background with & and not create a shell on the other side (just open the tunnel) with a command line flag (I see you already did this with -N).
• Save the PID with PID=$!
• Do your stuff
• kill $PID

EDIT: Fixed $? to $! and added the &