Controlling ssh from an external program

[Jeff Anderson]

Hi -

I am working on a remote administration tool, and I would like to be able to 
control ssh/scp via an external program. I know the standard answer to this 
is to use expect, however this is NOT an option.

The next standard answer is to use an empty passphrase or ssh-agent, but I 
cannot guarantee that the remote system will have a keypair, so I need to be 
able to fallback on password authentication if that fails. The controlling 
program needs to be able to feed the password to ssh/scp.  


Additionally, I can only use an unmodified version of openssh (i.e. whatever 
version is available on the system that the admin tool is run from).

Any ideas?????


==========================================================
Jeff Anderson