I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. My question was how I would go about creating a variable for instance $host that is defined by the user in the command line argument. So that the $host that was defined by the user would be used later in the program as a host in the ssh2 connection. "program.pl -host 10.1.1.1" and now this ip would be the $host variable used with the ssh2 connection in the code.