does some one have a better idea of loging into a remote box and running an inline script on it?

Inlining like this can be a real pain. In your case, the interpolation phase is clobbering all your variables before you even pass the code to $ssh->cmd. You should probably be using single quotes. I think it would be a lot easier to avoid the inlining altogether, though, and just save the script to a file on the remote host.