FWIW, $params{'debug') = 'true' spits out a lot of debug information as the script is running, which coincidentally takes a long time. I got a bunch of this, (trimmed for brevity, anyone who's watched the output of ssh -v hostname will appreciate that)

$ perl netssh.pl
localhost: Reading configuration data /Users/username/.ssh/config
localhost: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config
localhost: Connecting to www.c2group.net, port 22.
localhost: Remote protocol version 1.99, remote software version OpenS
+SH_<some_version> FreeBSD
localhost: Net::SSH::Perl Version 1.29, protocol version 2.0.
localhost: No compat match: OpenSSH_<some_version> FreeBSD.
localhost: Connection established.
localhost: Sent key-exchange init (KEXINIT), wait response.
localhost: Algorithms, c->s: 3des-cbc hmac-sha1 none
localhost: Algorithms, s->c: 3des-cbc hmac-sha1 none
localhost: Entering Diffie-Hellman Group 1 key exchange.
localhost: Sent DH public key, waiting for reply.
localhost: Received host key, type 'ssh-dss'.
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... and finally:

Output:


Exit Code:
0
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I've already changed the my( my $stdout, my $stderr, my $exit2 ) line to remove the superflous "my"s... and now I notice the following:

if ($stdout){print "Output:\n$_\n\n";}
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$_ doesn't contain anything at that point, so this would work better:

if ($stdout){print "Output:\n$stdout\n\n";}
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As far as your original problem, do you have any special characters in your password that might be gumming up the works? (%, @, $ would all need to be escaped out of your password, especially if you have it in double quotes as your example code above)

$/  =  q#(\w)#  ;  sub  sig { print scalar reverse  join  ' ',  @_  } 
+ sig
map { s$\$/\$/$\$2\$1$g && $_ } split( ' ', ",erckha rlPe erthnoa stJu
+" );
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