Keychain is quite a useful tool for automating SSH logins without having to use password-less keys: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/keychain/ Normally it is used like this to set the SSH_AUTH_SOC and SSH_AGENT_PID variables: source ~/.keychain/hostname-sh (This is what's in hostname-sh) SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-XXn47DUn/agent.16721; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK; SSH_AGENT_PID=16722; export SSH_AGENT_PID; I would like these environment variables to be made available to a Perl script so that any "system" commands contained in the perl script will inherit them. How do you do this in Perl?