If you can use ssh instead of rsh (which maybe you should be doing anyway :), you can use Net::SSH::Perl, which has a method to execute a command remotely and get back the stdout, stderr, and exit status.

    use Net::SSH::Perl;
    my $ssh = Net::SSH::Perl->new($host);
    $ssh->login;
    my($out, $err, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($cmd);
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Exit status of remote command is in $exit.