You would have gotten the same result from the prompt. Your problem has nothing to do with Perl. 
root:root_password@foo.bar.com:/my/remote/path_name

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means file root_password@foo.bar.com:/my/remote/path_name on machine root. The path should be 
root@foo.bar.com:/my/remote/path_name

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You could feed the password to its STDIN (probably), but it would be better if you used public key authentication (so you don't need to specify a password at all).

In reply to Re: SCP help by ikegami
in thread SCP help by PyrexKidd

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