a.txt

like perl ruby <<


How about a "here document"

ssh otherhost << EOF
  ls some_folder;
  ./someaction.sh 'some params'
  pwd
  ./some_other_action 'other params'
EOF

To avoid the problems mentioned by @Globalz in the comments, you may be able to (depending what you're doing on the remote site) get away with replacing the first line with

ssh otherhost /bin/bash << EOF


http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html