I am rather new to Perl and translating some bash scripts to parse Apache logs from several remote production servers into a more useful format for processing on a local mac
If you're not passing arguments to the script, it should be as simple as
ssh "user@host" perl < $crawler
If you want to pass command line args, just use a "-" placeholder to get the same affect as the bash -s, i.e.
ssh "user@host" 'perl - arg1 arg2' < $crawler