Thanks for the help!

I'm not sure what I can do on the remote side to break me out of a running command. It seems like what I WANT to do is to control the SSH2 channels from my client side perl script.

Controlling SSH2 channels seems to be the intent of the software (documented in Net::SSH::Perl::ChannelMgr) but a lot of stuff that should be documented, isn't (like the break_client_loop call, as you pointed out).

I'm getting farther in understanding the guts of these modules. Hopefully I'll be able to get it right soon.