G'day kburns1969,

I'm not really familiar with the Net::OpenSSH module, so I could be barking up the wrong tree here, but it seems to me that's sitting on the shell prompt ("[kburns@ssl01:Active] ~ #") waiting for user input (in much the same way as you show with the manual process).

There's some other documented options that may be useful, e.g. async, stdin_fh and so on.