So a bit of background, I'm having issues with my port forwarding scripts as they do not actually kill themselves after the time I set.

Here's what I currently have:
I've been testing out the command timeout:

Code:

timeout 10 ssh -f -g -L 8080:host1:80 user@host1

but when I try to run the command I get the following:

Code:

Cannot fork into background without a command to execute.

I've also been looking into creating a config file just for these types of commands, but I don't see any values I can set to always kill the tunnel (TCPKeepAlive, ServerAliveInterval, are all based on data transfer)

Basically my main question is why am I unable execute the timeout command when I force it to the background?

A few other questions:
1) can you think of a way to get the connection to kill itself after an hour no matter what?
2) What data is being transferred when you're connected to a host but not running any commands (basically why is ServerAliveInterval not terminating if I ssh and do nothing)?

1 members found this post helpful.

Not sure if this is what you intended, but you pointing this out made me realize this is why my sleep command isn't working, some of my commands involved -N!

Thanks

... It's what I get for copying a command from the internet

It sounds as if you might want to look at screen or tmux.

Both of them allow you to detach from terminals and reconnect to them later.

In that case you might want to re-evaluate the -g option as well, which you seem to have included above.