Your immediate problem has been solved, but here are a few other pointers that may help.

1. #Trying to get default values working here -- still working on it
   [download]

   Check out Getopt::Long - makes processing command line arguments a snap.

2. You can save yourself a bit of typing, by doing:

   chomp($ipbase = <STDIN>);
   [download]

   Instead of:

   $ipbase = <stdin>;
   chomp ($ipbase);
   [download]

3. #I would like to find a way to turn off echo or mask this portion
   print "Password:";
   $password = <stdin>;
   [download]

   There are several ways to do this - check out perlfaq8. (You'll probably want to use Term::ReadKey)

4. It's always a good idea to check the return status of any filehandle operations (and a bad idea not to), because you never know what may have gone wrong outside your program. So..

   open(INFO,">$downreport");
   [download]

   Is better written as:

   open INFO, '>', $downreport or die "Cannot open $downreport:$!\n";
   [download]

   Note that any OS error will be returned as the contents of $!. Also note the use of open with three arguments, instead of two. This is generally accepted as a better (and safer) practice.
   Actually, even that is a bit outdated. These days perl allows you to use normal scalar variables as filehandle references. So you can do something like:

   open my $info, '>', $downreport or die "Cannot open $downreport:$!\n";
   [download]

   See the docs on open for more information.

5. One last point... anytime you find yourself repeating code, then thats a pretty good sign that you need to do a bit of abstraction, and break some of your code out into a subroutine. In your case, it's all the gathering of user input that you do via STDIN (Note that is is common practice to write STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR in all upper-case). So instead of:

   print "What is the base IP? (Example: 192.168.1)\n";
   $ipbase = <stdin>;
   chomp ($ipbase);
   
   print "What is the bottom IP? (Default 1)\n";
   $ipcurrent = <stdin>;
   chomp ($ipcurrent);
   
   print "What is the top IP? (Default 255)\n";
   $ipend = <stdin>;
   chomp ($ipend);
   
   # etc....
   [download]

   You could do something like:

   sub get_user_input {
       my $prompt = shift;
       print "$prompt\n";
       return chomp(<STDIN>)
   }
   [download]

   And then:

   $ipbase = get_user_input("What is the base IP? (Example: 192.168.1)");
   $ipcurrent = get_user_input("What is the bottom IP? (Default 1)");
   $ipend = get_user_input("What is the top IP? (Default 255)");
   [download]

   There are further levels of abstraction that could be applied if you wanted to (a dispatch table, for example) - but I'm sure you get the idea ;)

Hope all the above helps,
Cheers,
Darren :)

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