I am new to perl, and so to practice writing to another program, I decided to automate something I do often: FTPing into my email server to retrieve the contents of my inbox. (Since I can't use telnet at work, stupid firewalls.) Here is what I have: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

open (FTP, "|ftp") || (die "Couldn't fork process");
print FTP "open my.email.server\n";
print FTP "my_userid\n";
print FTP "my_password\n";
print FTP "lcd /windows/desktop\n";
print FTP "get /var/mail/userid\n";  #location of my inbox
print FTP "bye\n";
close FTP;

[download]
The odd thing is this: it works fin until the point at which it *should* put in the password for me. Then it hangs. If at this point I type the password and press enter, it says "Invalid command", and then continues as normal, putting the inbox file on the desktop as it should. What is going on here? Is there any way around this? Thanks.

In reply to Writing to a program by Anonymous Monk

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