Hello Ambrus, Thanks for the response. When I do this outside of perl I would do it with SSH_ASKPASS. (i.e. open up ssh-agent and then ssh-add the key - and using SSH_ASKPASS as a simple shell script to provide the password to ssh-add. This automates the whole process and then lets you freely ssh with password protected keys. To tell the truth I havent tested if SSH_ASKPASS is invoked from net::ssh::perl. i.e. say when the script Khen provided up runs. If it is, then this may work as I could set it to a shell script to simply echo the password. Ill have to give it a try :)