Salt SSH is very powerful in its default mode with salt-thin. However, there are some situations where it makes more sense to issue a raw SSH command. This can be accomplished using the --raw flag (referred to in its short form as -r from here on for brevity).

Using the raw mode will bypass all the overhead of creating and deploying the thin package: just log in to the target, issue a command, and log out. The following two commands are functionally identical:

# salt-ssh myminion cmd.run date
myminion:
    Fri Apr  3 21:07:43 MDT 2015
# salt-ssh -r myminion date
myminion:
    ----------
    retcode:
        0
    stderr:
    stdout:
        Fri Apr  3 21:07:43 MDT 2015

However, the raw command will execute faster because it has less overhead. It will also contain more information, such as STDERR, STDOUT, and the exit or return code from the command that was issued.

This can be useful if you wrap Salt SSH with another program that depends on the output (especially the...