Are you writing a client or a server? BTW, the variable $sockin above is not initialised.

Below is a simple client that connects to the echo server on port 7. Instead of using IO::Socket, you could write the client at a lower level using the socket/inet_aton/sockaddr_in/connect/close functions. See perldoc perlipc for more information. If you want to write a server instead, please let us know.

use IO::Socket;
my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
                                   PeerAddr => '127.0.0.1',
                                   PeerPort => 7,      # echo server
                                   Proto    => 'tcp',
                                   Type     => SOCK_STREAM
                                  );
  die "Could not create socket: $!\n" unless $sock;
print $sock "Hello there!\n";
my $answer = <$sock>;
print "answer: $answer\n";
close($sock);
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