pecl-ssh2 and remote command execution

Hi, I need to run remote command (by ssh), send it some data and receive its output and return value. I could run command like ssh user@server 'command' via proc_open or something like that. But I've discovered ssh2 pecl-extension and I liked the idea of using ssh directly from PHP. However I was not able to figure out, how to close input stream and how to obtain return value. I.e. let's have this code: $stream = ssh2_exec($connection,"head -n 4"); stream_set_blocking($stream, true); fputs ($stream,"line1\nline2\n"); while($o=fgets($stream)){ echo $o.'<br>';} fclose ($stream); The problem is that this one never ends as 'head -n 4' waits for two more lines as it does not know, that I've finished sending data. If I close the stream after sending two lines, then I can not get output (of course :-) ). I've tried sending chr(3), chr(4), chr(0) to indicate end of input but nothing works. I also would like to see what return value command returned but it can be done via adding second command like ' echo $?' Radek