Kurt-

You did good in pointing out the KISS solution here, as I failed to properly state the scope of the problem in my original request.

Actually, this is how I started doing things, but ended up with data-feature-creep, as I kept adding bits of information about each usr@host. Things now look something like this:

'me@hawaii' => {
    'SSHinfo' => {
        'Login' => 'myusr@warm.hawaii.com',
        'socks_proxy' => 'mysocksproxy.com',
        'socks_port' => 1234,
        'socks_protocol' => 4,
        'identity_files' => [ "$HOME/.sshspecial/toolauth" ],
        'user_known_hosts' => "$HOME/.sshspecial/knownhosts",
    },
    ...
},
...
[download]

Having all this data tied to each entry, it'll be better for me to save the structure.

-Craig