It would be cool if you could open an ftp or an scp session like a filehandle, but unfortunately you can't. The underlying functionality, like scp, doesn't seem to support reading or writing to anything else than a file on disc. If it could at least read and write from STDIN/STDOUT, you could possibly wrap an scp session in a module that would allow accessing it as a filehandle. If you wanted to implement that today, you would have to change the scp binary.

Anyway, look at the scp modules, they seem to be really nice when it comes to transfering files back and forth.

You aren't using rcp are you? scp is almost a drop-in replacement, and apart from the increased security, it's in my opinion more robust. ssh really gives you so many added features over rsh/rcp/xrsh...