closing ssh ControlPath

Question

I found the instructions on kerneltrap's mail archive: "scp batch mode?" to be insightful an useful, however when I issue the command to close the connection

# Bring the connection down.
ssh -S /tmp/ssh_socket -O exit dummy

my ssh complains that it does not support the -O (that is upper case o) option.

My question is: Is it sufficient to delete the /tmp/ssh_socket, to properly close the connection, or am I missing some important step here?

Answer 1

rm is sufficient, though you can kill the control process as well with a fuser -k /tmp/ssh_socket.