I don't really want to comment on your telemetry problem, because I've never piped one script to another like that (and don't want to give you any wrong info), but I can tell you that the <> basically is STDIN. Any time you are assigning it to a variable, you are reading from STDIN up until a carriage return. Obviously if you have it in a loop like while(my $data = <>) then it'll keep reading until some condition breaks the loop. Hope that helps, if even a bit!