Sorry about that. For the fatal error I ran it in a place that had some other die handler running I + didn't know about. The following is from a standard environment. I execute this code... use Net::SFTP::Foreign; my $sftp = Net::SFTP::Foreign->new( host => 'sftp.myhost.com', user => 'user', more => [qw(-v -i /home/user/.ssh/my_priv_key)] ); $sftp->error and die "SSH connection failed: " . $sftp->error; using this command... perl -T SFTPTest.pl and I get this error msg... SSH connection failed: Connection to remote server is broken at SFTPTest.pl line 9. When I use this command... perl SFTPTest.pl it works fine. Sorry for the confusion! Thanks.