Thanks for the reply, Tye!

I'm making newbie errors all over the place here. As it turns out, the ->break() was working fine. I was misinterpreting what I saw in the input log file. I expected a nice human-readable log file based on the Net::Telnet docs, but instead it's filled with extended-ASCII or otherwise garbled text. I originally thought this was the output of the GUI-based app that's auto-launching, but I think instead this is a problem related to terminal character set or somesuch.

The actual problem (the ->cmd timeout) was due to my setting the prompt incorrectly. I set it to the default /[%#>] $/, which would match what I see in an interactive telnet session. However, the log file shows that the server is sending something like "a21R39", which I again suspect is a terminal-type issue. For testing, I set the prompt to /./ and it continued past this point.

BTW, your ->print("\x28") works for a break too. :-) Thanks again. I welcome anyone's thoughts on the prompt issue, but I won't be ticked if I'm ignored. I'll do a little more research before I post on this again.