If you feel comfortable with sending unencrypted passwords across your network, then you can start the telnet server on a win2000 box, and if you disable NTLM authentication (set NTLM to 0 with the tlntadmn.exe program) you can log in on it and run programs from a *nix terminal.

One oddity, you need to print to STDOUT or STDERR to get any teminal output if you play with perl -e. perl -e "print yoo" won't work but perl -e "print STDOUT yoo" will.

Create a script on the win2000 machine and run it from the terminal, capture the output and do whatever with it.

Note: I don't advocate using telnet because you usually want your session encrypted and use ssh or something. But if you have a specific situation that makes it OK, then this solution will probably work.

/brother t0mas