I would do what marto recommended.

But the docs for Net::SSH::Perl say this should work:

# Runs the command $cmd on the remote server and returns 
# the stdout, stderr, and exit status of that command.

# If $stdin is provided, it's supplied to the remote 
# command $cmd on standard input.

my ($out, $err, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($cmd, $stdin )
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Cheers,

Brent