Background Programs - & and ENV Var's in PERL

Background Programs - & and ENV{} Var's in PERL

Hi, I've been recently implementing a program that will access incoming data by forwarding data from an ip address to a local port and gathering that data, using these commands.

ssh -l ec34 -L 12345:127.0.0.1:10237 192.101.77.209 -n

Unfortunately this command takes up the command line, and when i add a '&' to it, I get the error:

Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.

A wise friend of mine suggested looking into Environment Variables and modify one. I used the code:

foreach $key (sort keys(%ENV)) {

print "$key = $ENV{$key}

n";

}

To display these variables, but found nothing I felt I could use against this error. I'm thinking I may be missing a parameter in the `ssh...` command once I have added an ampersand & to it, or I have now confused it into thinking it's going to output into standard in (possibly as a default for the background), and I dont know why. Does anyone know how I can connect this data to a local port behind the scenes?