Nowadays, the standard way to run commands in a remote Linux or Unix server is to use SSH. Telnet is an insecure and obsolete protocol.

use Net::SSH::Any;
my $ssh = Net::SSH::Any->new($host, user => $user, password => $passwo
+rd);
my $output = $ssh->capture({stdin_data => $input_data}, $cmd);
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On Windows, in addition to Net::SSH::Any, you will have to install Net::SSH2, there are ppm versions of this package available from the net.