What I have been trying to do is use open3 to telnet to the target machines
One idea: you can use Net::Telnet to access the remote machine. It might make the interface a bit more versatile. I'm not absolutely sure, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it comes with Perl.

Lincoln Stein has written about it in his book "Network programming with Perl", and this particular chapter about telnet, is available online.

In reply to Re: grabbing logfile excerpts from remote machines by bart
in thread grabbing logfile excerpts from remote machines by gnu@perl

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