Thank you, Graff and Talexb. You are correct that the path I want to tred is the one you outline. I would LOVE to use Net::SSH::Perl to place a file in a location designated by the user/pass - then have a watching cron job fire off the remaining process and follow with an email. That has been the dream all along. Only I can't get Net::SSH::Perl to work like everyone else seems to get it to work. I still have that hurdle of the error message and the thing wanting to write to a /.ssh file that doesn't exist or doesn't have write access to create.

In the documentation it implies that you will log onto the server as that users and can execute command as that user.

I want to do that - is there a way?

Thank you for all the support. I appreciate the time you are taking!
Ronni