How do I pass commands (shell) to a persistent SSH tunnel rather than open a connection for every instance? I have a Python scraper running on a client server which passes URL variables and shell commands to a remote host via a reverse tunnel (forwarded port), so that the URL's are then executed on the host (python fabric ssh localhost:12345 'browser open URL'). I could make the reverse tunnel persistent but how do I echo the url/command to the session? Update - ControlMaster (built into SSH) solves this one.