How to get the PID from a spawned process in expect?

Question

Example: In a shell script I open a SSH tunnel whit this:

/usr/bin/expect <<EOD
set timeout -1
spawn ssh -fNL localhost:1873:localhost:873 HOST
expect "*?assword:" { send "$SSHPASS\r"}
sleep 2
exit [exp_pid]
EOD

export SSH_PID=$?
echo $SSH_PID

now $SSH_PID has some number, but it is not the PID of the spawned ssh. I tried different ways I found but non worked. Any Idea?

Answer 1

Exit status are 8 bit intergers (though most shells (ksh93 being an exception) will truncate it to 7 bits as they use bit 8 for signaled processes), so it will only work if the pid is between 0 and 127. Get the pid from a pipe instead of the exit status:

SSH_PID=$(
expect <<EOD
...
spawn -noecho ssh ...
puts [exp_pid]
...
EOF
)