1 new of 22 responses total.
I don't know if ssh is commonly considered a "tool" in the same way
that ls and cat are, but I know that it and its relative scp can be
used in pipelines and other Unixy constructs for processing remote
data locally, without establishing a remote "session" in the usual
sense. A few (probably silly) examples off the top of my
head of things I could do at a local shell prompt in a terminal
window on my laptop. (What the examples actually do is left as
an exercise for the reader.)
(1) ssh grex.org last | grep '\.msu\.edu ' | wc -l
(2) ssh grex.org cat '/bbs/agora50/_*'|grep '^,U.*,cross$'|wc -l
(3) for f in `ssh grex.org ls /bbs/agora33/_*`
do scp grex.org:$f .
done
Yes, I'm sure there are better ways of doing all the above (example 3
is particularly hideous), but I'm just illustrating a point here.
You have several choices: