This may be a bit of a tangent, but as I understand it, Net::SSH::Perl is a pure-Perl implementation of SSH, and as such can involve quite a long delay on login (I'm guessing because of the math crunching involved? Or is it transfer delay?) What would be the best way to implement something that just layers on top of the standard ssh client, but allows you to specify a password rather than RSA/DSA keys? For instance, I'm using Net::SFTP::Foreign for SFTP, it's hugely faster than Net::SFTP.