How to tell if an ssh ControlMaster connection is in use

You could simply use

ssh -o ControlPath=$socket -O check 

for each $socket you've open (easy if you keep them in a single directory).

This returns 255 if the check fails (connection not active anymore), an other value if it pass. You may need to specify the hostname too, but nothing that an awk on $socket won't give you :)

@Renik's answer didn't work for me. See below for what did.

---

This works for me using just the socket file for the control master:

$ ssh -o ControlPath=~/.ssh/<controlfile> -O check <bogus arg>

NOTE: You can also use ssh -S ~/.ssh/<controlfile> ... as well, which is a bit shorter form of the above.

Example

Here's an example where I've already established a connection to a remote server:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-57db26a0499dfd881986e23a2e4dd5c5c63e26c2 -O check blah
Master running (pid=89228)
$

And with it disconnected:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-66496a62823573e4760469df70e57ce4c15afd74 -O check blah
Control socket connect(/Users/user1/.ssh/master-66496a62823573e4760469df70e57ce4c15afd74): No such file or directory
$

If it were still connected, this would force it to exit immediately:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-66496a62823573e4760469df70e57ce4c15afd74 -O exit blah
Exit request sent.
$

It's unclear to me, but it would appear to potentially be a bug in ssh that it requires an additional argument at the end, even though blah is meaningless in the context of the switches I'm using.

Without it gives me this:

$ ssh -S ~/.ssh/master-57db26a0499dfd881986e23a2e4dd5c5c63e26c2 -O check
usage: ssh [-1246AaCfGgKkMNnqsTtVvXxYy] [-b bind_address] [-c cipher_spec]
           [-D [bind_address:]port] [-E log_file] [-e escape_char]
           [-F configfile] [-I pkcs11] [-i identity_file]
           [-L [bind_address:]port:host:hostport] [-l login_name] [-m mac_spec]
           [-O ctl_cmd] [-o option] [-p port]
           [-Q cipher | cipher-auth | mac | kex | key]
           [-R [bind_address:]port:host:hostport] [-S ctl_path] [-W host:port]
           [-w local_tun[:remote_tun]] [user@]hostname [command]

Version info

OSX

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.9p1, LibreSSL 2.1.8

CentOS 7.x

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_7.4p1, OpenSSL 1.0.2k-fips  26 Jan 2017

I confirmed that on both of these versions, the need for the additional bogus argument was required.

References

• How to close (kill) ssh ControlMaster connections manually
• How to exit OpenSSH control master process without using lsof or fuser?