I am writing some Perl code that is going to be interacting with Subversion (svn) repositories at both local and remote sites. The users should have themselves set up so they don;'t have to provide ssh passwords when they attempt to contact repositories via Subversion's svn+ssh connection mechanism, but there is no guarantee that they have already.

The problem I have is that I would like to find a nice, elegant, and Perl way to check to see if a password is required to access the remote file server. I can kludge something together by looking at the output of "scp" with the "-B" option but I would like something a bit simpler and more elegant.

Thanks in advance!