I don't really have much to say about your problem directly, but I'm positive someone else is going to come around and recommend POE::Component::IRC instead of Net::IRC, so I'll just do that. PoCo::IRC is very nice, and as an added bonus you'll learn how to use POE. You might want to seriously consider switching. If you do, you'd probably want to check out the POE Cookbook, and in particular the IRC Bots section.