From what I understand, security is not a concern in your case.

You may want to have a look at Net::Rexec which does what you want without the burden of opening and closing a telnet session each time.

It's considered highly insecure, but in these time of cut-and-paste hackers a telnet daemon is not any better.

For a more secure and pragmatic approach, have a look at ssh support for Perl.

I haven't tried these modules for secure authentication and remote command execution, but the ssh command allows that, and so may this code.

-- TMTOWTDI