That's because you have an additional shell in the remote side interpreting escapes and quoting.

You need to add an extra level of quoting resulting in... 

'perl\\ -e\\ \\\'\\$s\\ \\=\\ shift\\;\\ \\$SIG\\{ALRM\\}\\ \\=\\ sub\
+\ \\{\\ kill\\ INT\\ \\=\\>\\ \\$p\\ \\}\\;\\ exec\\(\\@ARGV\\)\\ unl
+ess\\ \\$p\\ \\=\\ fork\\;\\ alarm\\ \\$s\\;\\ waitpid\\ \\+\\$p\\,\\
+ 0\\ \\\'\\ 3\\ \\\'ls\\ -ltr\\\''

[download]
Or you can use Net::OpenSSH and forget about this quoting nightmare: 
use Net::OpenSSH;
my $ssh=Net::OpenSSH->new($server);
my $line = $ssh->capture(perl => -e => <<'EOC', 3, 'ls -ltr');
$s = shift;
$SIG{ALRM} = sub {kill INT => $p};
exec(@ARGV) unless $p = fork;
alarm $s;
waitpid $p, 0;
EOC

[download]
And check also GRID::Machine, that allows to run perl code in remote machines through SSH.

In reply to Re: perl -e in ssh by salva
in thread perl -e in ssh by Anonymous Monk

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