One of my first thoughts though, is to make a feedback channel

That's an excellent idea.

Actually the module already does have the server respond to the client after each command.  It did occur to me previously that it might be useful to send back a better response than just "" (blank) for success, but I never implemented it.

Let me try modifying the code to send back the client's (x, y) position (and possibly one or two other parameters); the client side can then parse the values from the response, and make them available to the calling program.

Update:  I've made some fairly large changes to the module, such that the query command (and the alias ask) are no longer necessary.  Instead, every time command (or cmd) is called, the user is passed back a hash containing all "interesting" parameters and their values.

I've got to first make sure that my tests still run, but after that I'll be posting the module to CPAN soon (hopefully this evening).

Update 2:  The code is now available at CPAN.