I was attempting something similar to read back configuration files from Netscreen firewalls a few years ago and I seem to recall as outlined in the docs....@vacation_str=$telnet->cmd; will output your command and then read the characters sent back up to and including the matching prompt. Which is not what I think you are trying to accomplish.

You can probably verify what is going on by using dump_log().

I would also check out attempting something like

$telnet->cmd("$CAT /home/$username/.vacation.msg");
@vacation_str=$telnet->getlines();
[download]

which should read back all the lines of data until eof is read.