* I don't see where $HOME is ever getting set, so your destination is??

--> To be honest, I did not really look at it very seriously because the file was getting copied at the desired location i.e., in the home dir of $user. After i changed it to $ENV{'HOME'}, even the first SCP is not working now. Now i get the following:

Initiating subroutine to copy war on remote machine...
Copying war: remote-web.war
Target Machine: xx.xxx.xxx.xx
User: tom

at /home/tom/perl/5.18.2/lib/site_perl/5.18.2/Expect.pm line 760.ar: P
+ermission denied
[download]

* Use of uninitialized value $HOME in string at /home/tom/deploy.pl line 59 I take it this is not all your code?

--> Yes, it indeed isn't all my code. I only pasted the relevant portions just to avoid cluttering.

* to clarify, both the transfer and the archive verified to work on the remote machine?

--> Yes, everything is working if i use the command line.