Might I suggest that you instead use Net::SSH::Perl (self-promotion, yes), which provides a Perl client interface to SSH?

It would make this much easier: 

    use Net::SSH::Perl;
    my $ssh = Net::SSH::Perl->new($host);
    $ssh->login($user);
    my($out, $err, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($cmd);

[download]
$out now holds the STDOUT of the command $cmd on the remote machine, so it looks just like it would if you had logged into the remote machine and run the command. So you can do a pattern match on it, for example, to see if 'fwd' is running.

In reply to Re: Help with Net::SSH by btrott
in thread Help with Net::SSH by dru145

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