Grepping for running ssh process has potential for false positives

[dicato]

This is because ps -elf truncates the command that is running. This can be fixed by writing and reading a PID file.

[younicksguy69]

In a shell script you can use this to get the PID file.

ssh -l username server -N
PID="$!"
echo $PID > $PIDFILE

This way you can check the PIDFILE and if that process exists you can check to see if it is an ssh process and if so you can be reasonably sure that it is your process.

[dicato]

Apparently you can call .pid on the result of Popen. So writing x.pid to file for reading later should work.