[peff]

One downside of libraries like libssh is that they don't behave the same way as your regular ssh command. So thing you've configured like host aliases, proxy commands, etc, don't just work out of the box (and in some cases may not even be supported at all).

[deckar01]

True. It sounds like there is room for an ORM-like sanitizer for SSH that is responsible for translating a C API to sanitized commands. I have no clue what to search to find if that already exists.

[virtualized]

It almost seems like ad-hoc text formats like command line argument syntaxes are difficult to use correctly.