Great advice on questions 1 and 3, Tanktalus.

I'll look into signals for my first problem (seeing when the configuration file finished being changed).

For the 3rd problem, the remote system is out of my control: I telnet to it without a userid/password and I'm in. The remote system (running VxWorks) offers few commands and immediately dumps stuff, I presume, to stderr. So I was going to use $telnet->getline, but I can't get past $telnet->login because that statement requires username and password.

On the 2nd question, my app is a middleman ... I let people define what logfiles (and search string and optional run-if-match command) to look for and then I generate a single new logfile that must be in a specific format. Another existing app will look at my new logfile and it can grab that data at any time and rotate it out (rename it) into a backup file. That's the reason I'm doing the inefficient open/write/close each time. So I'm not sure how I can use a database since I'm not privy to the app reading my output logfile. I had hoped opening in append mode would not lock it so the other app could grab it, but alas that didn't work. One other less efficient choice is a system call to cat to append things.

UPDATE ON Net::Telnet

Played some more and discovered that the Net::Telnet->new() made the connection to the id-less/psw-less system and I didn't need to do a $telnet->login. Since the remote system is forever dumping data (as far as I was concerned), I planned to looped forever: 

my $line;
while ($line = $telnet->getline)
{
  print $line;
}

[download]
But since it dumps data at different times, I ran into a "read timed-out" problem. Is there a way to disable the timeout? Setting to 0 didn't work, so I set it to a high value (one day): 
my $line;
while ( $line = $telnet->getline(Timeout=>86400000) )
{
  print $line;
}

[download]

In reply to Re^2: POE::Wheel questions by shockers
in thread POE::Wheel questions by shockers

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