AlexP, good to see you continuing your learning Perl journey after such an excellent start!

Writing little TCP servers for use in automated testing is a perfect fit for Perl, at least I've often whipped up little Perl servers, which I probably wouldn't have bothered with if I had to code them in C. For a complete working example of such a server (that handles multiple simultaneous connections) see:

• Re: Multiple consecutive connections to a socket - example event-driven server using IO::Select