Scheduled Automatic Backup of LTM's

I run a perl script from cron, which uses SSH to run a bash script on the remote F5 to create a UCS backup, then SCP to copy the UCS off.

Here's a simplified version of my script:

!/usr/bin/perl

$ip = 10.1.2.3;
$hostname = "myF5";

$remotefile = "/var/tmp/backup.ucs";
$localfile =  "/backup/$hostname.ucs";

$cmd = << CMD;
if [ -n "`file -L /bin/bigpipe|grep text`" ]; then
   tmsh save /sys ucs $remotefile 2>/dev/null
else
   bigpipe config save $remotefile 2>/dev/null
fi
CMD

open SSH, "| /usr/bin/ssh -q -T -o \"ConnectTimeout 10\" -l root $ip";
print SSH "$cmd";
close SSH;
if ($? != 0) {
    die "SSH to $hostname failed with $?\n";
}

system("$scp -o \"ConnectTimeout 10\" root\@$ip:$remotefile $localfile 2>/dev/null");
if ($? != 0) {
       die "SCP to $hostname failed with $?\n";
}