Thanks for the reply. I updated the initial question code with perlTidy's output. I did google quite a bit for the ssh portion of code. I couldn't get the channel to function as I wanted using cpan's example code. The telnet portion was created from a simple telnet script a co-worker created a few years ago, however I added quite a few conditionals and login subs due to a lack of standardization within the environment. I couldn't source the tidbits if I tried, if that is what you are getting at. Thanks, Monk