Question

I want to connect to a remote host listed in ~/.ssh/config, run a command (ps specifically) and extract the output.

Which is the simplest tool that can do all this?

Answer 1

I suggest you Paramiko, a python native ssh library.

A (very) basic example of how you’d use it (connection based on ssh-key):

import paramiko

client = paramiko.SSHClient()

client.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())

client.connect('127.0.0.1')

stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command('date')

for line in stdout:
    print line,
print

Output:

Fri Nov 23 17:36:09 EET 2012