well i tried again when i came in this morning and voila! everything works just fine.

thank you all for your inputs. i'm just going to chalk it up to the fact it's a vm running on a m$oft box and after the reboot everything is happy happy. :-)

i've made a couple of mods to what i had and below is my working copy...

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::OpenSSH;
use Expect;
use IO::Stty;
use DateTime;


use Creds qw($user $pass $enpass);
my $logpath = '/var/log/myssh/';

my $host = $ARGV[0];
my $timeout = 5;
my $connstr="$user:$pass\@$host";

my $dt = DateTime->now(time_zone=>'local');

my $log = $logpath.$host."-".$dt->datetime();

my $ssh = Net::OpenSSH->new("$connstr", timeout => 10);
$ssh->error and die "unable to connect to host: ". $ssh->error;


my ($pty, $pid) = $ssh->open2pty();

my $expect = Expect->init($pty);
$expect->log_file($log);

$expect->expect($timeout,
        [
                '>' =>
                sub {
                        $expect->send('enable');
                        $expect->send("\r");
                        $expect->expect('Password:');
                        $expect->send($enpass);
                        $expect->send("\r") ;
                        $expect->expect('-re', '/\w+[#]\s/');

                }
        ],
        [
                '#'
        ],
);

$expect->interact();



`gzip $log`;
[download]

it's working well enough for authenticating to cisco devices, going to enable mode, and logging the session. admittedly it needs a bit more spit and polish, but first i'm gonna get more caffeine.

happy coding!!