At Gabriele Renzi''s request, I''ve added URI support to the SFTP subsystem of Net::SSH: require ''uri/sftp'' uri = URI.parse( "sftp://some.host.com/path/to/file" ) You can also specify SSH options in the query portion of the URI: URI.parse( "sftp://host/path?compression=zlib&encryption=blowfish-cbc,idea-cbc&debug=0" ) AND, even better, you can use the open-uri routines to download files via SFTP: require ''uri/open-sftp'' io = open( "sftp://host/path?options" ) puts io.read.length This is in CVS now, and I''ve added some documentation of this feature to the manual in CVS, under the SFTP chapter. TODO: comment the uri/sftp and uri/open-sftp files. I was in too much of a hurry and even forgot to put the file header comment in either file. -- Jamis Buck jgb3@email.byu.edu http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis "I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."