While it's really cool that ssh will map the remote's std{in,out,err} to the local FDs representing those streams, it would be nice to be able to map additional remote FDs to local FDs. A working example of how this might be useful: #!/bin/bash exec 3>/tmp/remote_xtrace ssh --map_fd 3:3 remote "export BASH_XTRACEFD=3; id; ls -l" That way one can get the xtrace of the remote script being run without it polluting the stderr stream. I am sure there are tons of other examples of how this would be useful.