As the login seems to be successful, it appears that the command is not returning any output, and is exiting "normally".

My own foray into this kind of script just calls ssh through a backtick or qx//, like so:

my @result = qx/$ssh ${user}\@${host} '$cmd'/;
[download]

which isn't as easy to separate the various results. I also have pre-shared key login, so there's no password prompt. And that doesn't help you.

I'll see if I can attract more attention to this.