Listen to Jeremy. Here is what he is saying... your perl program is starting another program (in this case "telnet"). As long as telnet will run, your perl script will go into a waiting mode. None of the subsequent commands will be run. When telnet quits, you will get what one always gets whenever a perl command is run... either the value of the last expression evaluated, or a 0 (in case of failure) or a 1 (in case of success. So, either telnet is going to fail, and then your script will fail (unless you wrap telnet inside an eval block), or telnet will succeed, end, and return 1. Either way, your objective is not served.

Listen to Jeremy. Read the advised manual and try and understand how perl can be used to actually either completely replace telnet, or work with other programs.

Hope this helps you.