Thanks tachyon. All i want to do is connect to my server and send off a file of test commands one by one ,capturing the incoming replies so that they can be logged and processed and more commands added to the send queue depending on the incoming.
I guess the closest analogy would be an IRC client where i can receive messages in reply to my client or just receive a message from another client connected to the same server.
All the client examples i can find only deal with a very simple client thats either synchromous or only handles sends I had this before and it works great.

die "can't fork: $!" unless defined($kidpid = fork());

if ($kidpid) {    # We are the parent. Handle incoming
    my $header;
    my $body;
     
     
    while(1)
    {    
        while (defined sysread $handle,$header,9,0) 
        {
            print $header,"\n";
            if($header =~ m/([A-Z]{4})(\d{5})/)                 
            {
                my $messagetype = $1;
                if($2 != 00000)
                {
                $2 =~ m/0+(\d+)/;                        #remove  
                sysread $handle,$body,$1,0;                #receive am
+ount specified in header 
             
                 
            
                }
                
                check_header_type $messagetype, $body, $handle;  #do t
+hings with this message
                
            }
        }
    }
        
    
    kill("TERM" => $kidpid);        # send SIGTERM to child
}
###############################################
# Child Process
###############################################
else {                              
    # Child.  handle all sends
    
    while ($line = <INPUTFILE>)     {
        
        chomp $line;
        if(!($line =~ m/\A#/))     #check for '#' in file as comment s
+ign
        {syswrite DEBUG, "Got Line\n";
            
            my $bod = add_header($line);     
            
            syswrite $handle, $bod;
        }
         
    }
    
}
[download]

but im stuck in cygwin, no debugging support, and passing new messages to the child process to send is starting to complicate things (from what i know)just for hacked up client.
So really im trying to get the above working smoothly without fork.
thanks