You may want to look at Net::SSH or even Net::SSH::Perl. Personally, I use this sort of construct, which you might want to plop inside an eval (see alarm):

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::SSH qw(sshopen3);
my $command = "/some/remote/command";
  
my $reader = IO::File->new();
my $writer = IO::File->new();
my $error  = IO::File->new();

sshopen3( "$user\@$host", $writer, $reader, $error, $command ) or die 
+$!;
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