Maybe using IO::Socket will make your life easier, since it doesn't require getting down and dirty like you have done with sysread. It's an IO::Handle, which makes reading and writing from it a lot simpler, and besides, making sockets has never been easier.

As an additional note, you probably want to use strict. You have declared $buffer and then you use $buf, and $numBytes is undeclared, at least in your example.

Further, your last regular expression (regex) is specified as /<*>/. You may not realize that "*" is special, meaning here "zero or more of the previous character", so this will match any of the following: >,<>,<<>,<<<>, etc. It will not, however, match <*> since this is not just angle brackets. For that, you need to use /<\*>/.

If you meant to specify that there is something inside angle brackets, then what you need is /<[^>]*>/ or /<([^>]*)>/ where the second version puts the contents of the brackets in $1.