Yes, the data is indeed delayed and the non-blocking call does return undef every now and then. This is why I call get_channel() repeatedly from get_response() and accumulate the results until I see the prompt.

The reason I can't do blocking calls is because the channel will never EOF or return a short buffer unless I tell the host to "exit" and terminate the connection. Not cool if I want to execute more commands based on the output from a previous command.