How to stop/kill an autossh tunnel?

Question

Now that I have a autossh tunnel, what is correct way to stop it?

There seems to be no easy way to do this. Documentation is unclear on this part.

The easy way seems to be to reboot the machine? Is this correct?

Answer 1

No, the proper way to kill autossh is simply to kill the process autossh, nothing else.

The reason is

# file $(which autossh)
/usr/bin/autossh: POSIX shell script, ASCII text executable

that autossh is simply a shell script, not a service. It starts a new program, in its very last line,

exec /usr/lib/autossh/autossh "$@"

again not a service. As for exec (you can double-check it in the wiki of the Bash hackers), it is a shell-builtin command which replaces the current shell with the following command (/usr/lib/autossh/autossh "$@" in this case) without starting a new process. So, the only way to stop autossh is to kill the calling script, for instance

pkill -3 autossh

(thanks to dviljoen for pointing out the importance of using the -3 flag, see below). Incidentally, killing the ssh connection will not work, because the calling command (i.e., the one above) will simply start a new connection as soon as it realizes the old one has been dropped.

Answer 2

run auto ssh with:

AUTOSSH_PIDFILE=/var/run/tunnel.pid autossh

kill it with:

kill pid

BTW

pkill -9 autossh is a wrong

-9 makes sure the process not exiting gracefully, so ssh process is still there when the autossh process is killed

without -9 is still bad, if you have multiple tunnels running, pkill will kill them all

correct way is to set AUTOSSH_PIDFILE env var then kill that pid only

Answer 3

Search for the process:

ps aux | grep ssh

The secon column is the PIDnumber

Kill process by PID :)

kill -9 PIDnumber

Use sudo if you dont have root privileges.

Answer 4

I know this has been answered, but contrary to the comments above, using pkill -3 autossh does NOT kill the sshd child processes for me.

I use this function in my .bashrc file.
Bascially, it's like adding a --kill argument to autossh.

  if [ "$1" = "--kill" ]; then
    ps aux | 
    grep -P "(/usr/bin/ssh|/usr/lib/autossh/autossh)\s.*$2" |
    awk '{print $2}' |
    xargs -r kill
  else
    $(which autossh) "$@"
    echo "" # prevents line wrapping when you kill the ssh process
  fi

You can run which ssh and which autossh to check the paths on your system.

As long as the first argument isn't --kill, it just passes the args along to autossh.

This script kills the autossh & ssh instances. This is important if you are using port forwarding because, killing ONLY the autossh instance doesn't kill the tunnel, it just prevents it from reconnecting if/when it finally does disconnect.

You can also specify a search term (host name) to kill only specific tunnels.

autossh --kill dbserver1 kills just the connections to dbserver1
autossh --kill dbserver will kill dbserver1, dbserver2, etc.
autossh --kill dbserver will kill ALL autossh connections

To clarify, it SHOULD kill only the SSH sessions started by autossh.

If you run ps aux | grep ssh while you have both autossh and ssh sessions running, you will see that the ones started by autossh use the full path (/usr/bin/ssh and /usr/lib/autossh/autossh).
This script only matches results to processes started with the speicifc path. I did this because I (and I assume most people) usually type ssh and not the full path, which keeps it from killing my normal ssh sessions.

Hope this help others.