my %cmds = ( 'bash' => '/usr/local/bin/bash',
             'gzip' => '/usr/bin/gzip',
             'lzop' => '/usr/bin/lzop',
             'wc'   => '/usr/bin/wc' );


my @zip_results = `$cmds{'bash'} -c '$cmds{$compress} -dc $file | $cmds{'wc'} -c ; echo \${PIPESTATUS\@}'`;

I'm struggling with trying to identify a failure in a set of piped commands run on a remote host via ssh. I use perl to build and run the command line as below


ssh $TARGET_HOST "sudo find $TARGET_DIR -name \'$TARGET_FILE\' | sudo 
+cpio --create --format ustar" | bzip2 -9 -c
[download]

Initially I just redirected the output to a file, which is fine if both the $TARGET_DIR and $TARGET_FILE exists. However, if one or both do not exist, then I still get a file created, but it's empty.
Things I've tried:
With $ret=system($cmd); and testing the the value of $ret:

• Pre-fixing the cmd with set -o pipefail &&.
• Adding set -o pipefail to the command run by ssh.
  
• Adding set -o pipefail to the command run by sudo.
  
• Doing the bzip2 locally.
  With @results = `$cmd`, and testing the value of $?:
• Adding ; echo \${PIPESTATUS\@}; to the end of $cmd, within the string passed to ssh.
• Adding ; echo \${PIPESTATUS\@}; to the end of $cmd, after the string passed to ssh.
  Using the @results approach, I only get one entry, so I suspect that the backtick method only sees one stream?
  
  Any ideas on how I can detect the remote pipeline failure?