This code seems to work but breaks on large files due to out of memory issues. I would think the file needs to be written out to file periodicly instead of cached in memory until the xfer completes or fails but I do not know quite how to go about it. We would use this to make backups of directories on remote machines with out creating a tar ball on the remote machine.

Does anyone know how to make it work with very large files?

use Net::SSH::Perl
# vars to set: $user, $password, $host, $local_fqn, $rmt_dir
open STDOUT, ">$local_fqn" or die "Can't redirect stdout";
select STDOUT; $| = 1;         # make unbuffered
$cmd="tar -czf - $rmt_dir";
my $ssh = Net::SSH::Perl->new($host);
$ssh->login($user, $password);
my($stdout, $stderr, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($cmd);
close STDOUT;
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