I just tested this, and I see what the problem is. To run the program in the background, you need to close up/redirect it's stdin,stdout,stderr filehandles, like in the daemonization process. Anyways, this syntax works.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Net::SSH2;


my $ssh2 = Net::SSH2->new();

#using keys authorization
my $pass = 'ztester';
$ssh2->connect('localhost') or die "Unable to connect Host $@ \n";
# works when run from z's homedir because you need
# permission to read the keys
$ssh2->auth_publickey('zentara',
                 '/home/zentara/.ssh/id_dsa.pub',
         '/home/zentara/.ssh/id_dsa',
          $pass );

my $chan = $ssh2->channel();
$chan->blocking(1);

#close up the filehandles... rename foo to whatever you want
$chan->exec("nohup /home/zentara/perlplay/net/zzsleep > foo.out 2> foo
+.err < /dev/null &");

$chan->send_eof;

exit;
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#!/usr/bin/perl
$|= 1;
while(1){
print time, "\n";
sleep 1;
}
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