some interesting points... I made the following changes but am still having the same problem. changed Socket to IO::Socket. removed the () in valid_req sub. removed the --debug option , and just made it use warnings; when i print "***$clientreq***\n" i get something like the following. >hello ***hello ...etc etc i don't see any extra chars... added the following line after my chomp. $clientreq =~ s/\n//g; no difference. any other ideas?