I see at least one other has had issues with xinetd. It also exhibits the same condition for me from cron, from an at job, even from a script that I've nohup'd and then logged out of the session. Apparently a controlling vty is needed.

The code segment itself looks like this:

  if( $options{protocol} eq 'ssh' ) {
    unless( defined $options{userid} ) {
      die "userid is a required parameter when using ssh\n";
    }
    if( $options{login} and not defined $options{passwd} ) {
      die "passwd is a required parameter for ssh if login is true\n";
    }
    @args = ( '/usr/bin/' . $options{protocol}, '-l', $options{userid}
+, '-p', $options{port}, '-q', '-o','StrictHostKeyChecking=no',$option
+s{target} );
  } elsif( $options{protocol} eq 'telnet' ) {
    @args = ( '/usr/bin/' . $options{protocol}, $options{target}, $opt
+ions{port} );
    if( $options{login} ) {
      unless( defined $options{userid} and defined $options{passwd} ) 
+{
        die "userid and passwd are both required parameters for telnet
+ if login is true\n";
      }
    }
  } else {
    die "Unknown protocol specified: $options{protocol}\n";
  }

  if( $options{logging} ) {
    unless( defined $options{logfile} ) {
      $options{logfile} = "$options{target}.log";
    }
    open( $options{fh}, ">", $options{logfile} ) || die "Can't open fi
+le $options{logfile}: $!\n";
  }

# ====================================================================
+=========
# Spawn the child process to contact the target device
# ====================================================================
+=========
  $options{pty} = IO::Pty::Easy->new;
  $options{pty}->spawn(@args) or die "Unable to spawn child process: $
+!\n";
[download]

at which point I unuversally get the "Unable to spawn child process" with no error number.

And yes, it works fine if I fire off the script from an interactive shell. That is the only way it does work.

What am I missing? I can't believe anything in Perl would REQUIRE an interactive shell.

(Oh and its running on CentOS 6.3 - so Linux not Windows)

Please advise.