Thanks for testing.

On both my local 2k8r2 boxes, and AWS 2012r2, I'm running as an admin.

I have the exact same setup both locally and on AWS. I'm in the process of installing a 2012 VM and will test there, and if it works, will upgrade it to R2 and test again. If it works on 2012R2 locally, I know the problem is with Amazon.

I don't think it's cpanm... running the script in the foreground allows it to go through without any interaction. I'll test with the dir command in my setup and see what happens.

update: I confirm that sending in the "dir" command works as I would expect on my AWS instances. Weird.