I only have an observation/comment. Reading the man page you gave for sshpass there is that security issue of seeing the password in the command line while it is running. I read the same issue for AESCrypt but it has an option to read the password from a file that can be read-only by the user. If you were so inclined to write your own sshpass you could see how AESCrypt handles it? Richard P Cook 613-796-4646 mobile