I feel your pain (there are still some old suns where I work, still running an ancient version of perl). Here's an idea that might keep things coherent for you. if the stuff that needs to be done on the remote box is always the same, there's no problem: put a shell or perl script there to do the job, and run that from your local machine via ssh in backticks.

But if the remote actions need to vary for whatever reason, your local perl script could probably build the necessary script that would need to run on the remote machine, save it to a local file, "scp" it to the remote box, and then run it via ssh in backticks. (But usually you can set it up so only one version of the remote script is needed, and it uses command-line args to handle the necessary variations.)