First I'd like to thank all of you who are commenting...

Second, I wanted to reiterate that the return value from the run_ssh ($login_output) always returns the value 1, no matter of it was successful or not. From what I read in the docs, this is because the return value of the spawn is returned, meaning that the ssh process was spawned successfully. The issue lies in the fact that the ssh connection dies immediately afterward (connection refused)... so the question becomes, how can I detect that an ssh connection has been terminated?

It appears that is the reason for this line: 
($ssh->read_all(2) =~ />\s*\z/) or die "where's the remote prompt?"

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But the script dies before it even finishes processing that line. The attempt to call a method on the $ssh object is what aborts the script. After the $ssh->run_ssh();, *anything* that is called from $ssh will do the same thing.

I've tried using login() with a password instead, but according to the docs, login() actually calls run_ssh() anyway, so the result is the same.

Would a 'waitfor' looking for connection refused help here perhaps?

In reply to Re^4: Problem with Net::SSH::Expect on unavailable hosts by sierpinski
in thread Problem with Net::SSH::Expect on unavailable hosts by sierpinski

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