I would go so far as to say thaty ou should NEVER automate the copying of your keys.

That's about on par with automating the installation of sshd on the remote machine everytime you wanted to connect.

That said, if you can can get your ssh keys set up so that your normal, commandline ssh client can connect to your romote system, then you should be good to go -- just don't specify a password to $ssh->login($user).

(You might run into passphrase issues ... but I think Net::SSH::Perl can deal with a key agent if you have one running -- I would guess that if you're trying to automate something, you probably want to use passphraseless key's anyway.)