I want to add that I think Net::SSH is a great idea, and that I voted your post ++.

Many times on perlmonks and in other perl discussion forrums someone recomends using part of the ssh family (ssh, scp, etc...) to do something on a remote machine because of the security afforded by the ssh protocol. This is great, but then your perl program has to launch a separate process to do part of the work. This separate process must be cared for, monitored, and managed. It would be far better to have SSH protocols built-into perl as a module.

Anyone who think that there is no place for Net::SSH probably enjoys using system to launch ftp instead of using Net::FTP. Those are not the kinds of programs I would want to have to work with or maintain.