jessenoller.com - SSH Programming with Paramiko | Completely Different
http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/05/ssh-programming-with-paramiko-completely-different/

"Having spent a lot of time scripting around the binaries and trying to manage timeouts, standard out/in/error pipes, authentication, arguments and options all through ‘’subprocess”, ”popen2”, etc., I’m here to tell you wrapping command line binaries is prone to error, difficult to test, and painful to maintain." Tell me about it. I just about pulled my hair out trying to do sftp from a web-based script.

OpenSSH is the ubiquitous method of remote access for secure remote-machine login and file transfers. Many people — systems administrators, test automation engineers, web developers and others have to use and interact with it daily. Scripting SSH access and file transfers with Python can be frustrating — but the Paramiko module solves that in a powerful way.