Thank you for the helpful response. I do appreciate it. Reading the man page you linked, however, I am struggling to understand it--maybe it's above my level.

How exactly is the Net::SSH2 protocol qualitatively different from an ordinary remote login via SSH? I'm not interested in passing things through Perl just for the sake of it, but rather to have a different interface and/or useraccess option.

Okay, I'll give an example to help illustrate the motivation for the question.

Occasionally, something seems to glitch and/or hangup on the server end with respect to the SSH daemon. When this happens, the server is still running fine, but SSH logins will not complete. The virtual server (VM) sometimes needs to be restarted in order to reopen access to the server. But if a Perl script could give some form of non-SSH-dependent access to commands on the server, the SSH daemon could be restarted without a VM reboot.

I once, years ago, had a script that I tweaked to provide basic access to tools like ls, chmod, pico, etc. to have some basic server access in the event of a problem with the SSH entry. Unfortunately, the SSH issues ended up being more than could be handled by my minimal Perl-script functionality. That's the sort of functionality I'm contemplating once again.