Here's a snippet from one I wrote earlier. (A perl telnet client actually, which seems to be essentially what you want) :

my $sockets = new IO::Select();
$sockets->add(\*STDIN);

my $tel = new IO::Socket::INET( PeerAddr => $hostname,
                                PeerPort => $port,
                                Proto    => 'tcp',
                                Timeout  => 60 );
die "Can't connect to $hostname ($!)" unless $tel;

$sockets->add($tel);

while(1)
{
    my @handles;
    @handles = $sockets->can_read(0.5);
    foreach $handle (@handles)
    {
        if($handle == $tel)
        {
            $data = <$tel>;
            last if(!$data);
            print STDOUT $data;
        }
        elsif ($handle == \*STDIN)
        {
            $line = <STDIN>;
            chomp($line);
            if ($line eq 'q' || $line eq 'quit')
            {
                $finish = 1;
                last;
            }
            else
            {
                print $tel $line."\r\n";
            }
        }
    }
}
[download]

I've simplified it some, you will need to probably read from the telnet socket using recv instead of <>, since this will hang when telnet sends lines without endling newline characters (which it is apt to do).

C.