Thinking a little out of the box, and your dumb arse comment made me think simple and I have no idea how to use rsh so I tried with dir using the following. 
perl -e 'system("dir")'   #failed
perl -e 'system(\"dir\")' #failed
perl -e system("dir")     #worked
perl -e system(\"dir\")   #worked

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If you posting is exactly what you type, could this be the be the answer?

In reply to Re: system call works on *nix not NT by Scarborough
in thread system call works on *nix not NT by Unholy One

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