We have released to the CPAN a package that implements some of the parts of Net::OpenSSH that were left as "an exercise to the reader." This is based on Andy and my experiences over at cPanel's QA department among other things. It differs in important ways from what was used in the QA department there (they also have moved on to a less bespoke testing framework nowadays):

• It is a "true" subclass, and any methods that are in particular specific to Linux can be implemented similarly as a subclass of Net::OpenSSH::More.
• It *automatically* reconnects upon dropped connections, etc. and in general is just a lot nicer to use if you wanted an "easy mode" SSH accessor lib for executing commands.
• Execution can be made *significantly* faster via a stable implementation of using expect to manage a persistent SSH connection.
...and more! See the POD for full details.

Many thanks of course go out to current and former colleagues (and cPanel/WebPros specifically), as despite their perl QA SSH libraries not being an actual product cPanel ever used anywhere publicly, methods like these eased remotely manipulating hosts we wished to run black box testing upon so much that even authors with minimal training in perl could successfully use to write tests that executed against a remote host. This is of value for organizations that have a need to run tests in an isolated environment, or for anyone wishing to build their own CI suite or SSH based orchestrators in perl without having to discover a lot of the hard "lessons learned" that almost anyone who has had to use Net::OpenSSH extensively will eventually learn.

Of course, the most profuse of thanks go out to Salvador, who provided the excellent module this extends.

Eventually we plan to extend this package to do even more (hehe), but for now figured this was good enough to release, as it has what's probably the most useful bits already.