looking glass

Tue May 25 15:18:13 UTC 2010

Once upon a time, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> said:
> it is perl insanity.  among other cpan sikness, it wants to build an
> entire perl implementation of ssh, with 666 other library modules
> included when there is a perfectly fine ssh client on the machine.

That would be because the perfectly fine ssh client on the machine does
not have a programmatic interface (OpenSSH has no library version and no
interest in making a library version), so using it has to fall back to a
complicated mess that creates a TTY, creates an SSH process attached to
the TTY, and then do Expect-style "send a string, wait for a string"
(which is a real PITA for error handling).

If you are writing a program to make SSH connections, you are much
better off using a different SSH client that has a library, e.g.
libssh2, perl's Net::SSH::Perl or Net::SSH2 (which is a perl interface
to libssh2), etc.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.