Anon Monk,
I asked for help on this very same topic. I was told that there is not really a perlish was to do this, but there are other things out there to help you do what you want. RSH (Remote Shell Daemon) which opens up a command box on the remote machine. SSH and WMI. While where i work, we have RSH, the powers that be want to get me to not use that to execute programs remotely. RCMD seems like too big of a security risk. We don't have SSH yet or WMI..but may be in the future. If you do find a perlish way to do this, please let me know. i would greatly appreciate it.
good luck. Ray