Paramiko: read from standard output of remotely executed command

The code in the accepted answer may hang, if the command produces also an error output. See Paramiko ssh die/hang with big output.

An easy solution, if you do not mind merging stdout and stderr, is to combine them into one stream using Channel.set_combine_stderr:

stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command(command)
stdout.channel.set_combine_stderr(True)
output = stdout.readlines()

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If you need to read the outputs separately, see Run multiple commands in different SSH servers in parallel using Python Paramiko.

You have closed the connection before reading lines:

import paramiko
client=paramiko.SSHClient()
client.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
com="ls ~/desktop"
client.connect('MyIPAddress',MyPortNumber, username='username', password='password')
output=""
stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command(com)

print "ssh succuessful. Closing connection"
stdout=stdout.readlines()
client.close()
print "Connection closed"

print stdout
print com
for line in stdout:
    output=output+line
if output!="":
    print output
else:
    print "There was no output for this command"