Graham Barr didn't seem to understand that errors for "system-related" operations should be returned by setting $! to something sane, and instead put the error text in $@, which is reserved for eval errors. No amount of pleading with him has seemed to convince him that he needs to set the appropriate value.

So try looking in $@ instead of $! when you get an IO::Socket::mumble error.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker