Without any code it's hard to see what you're doing wrong, but how about using IO::All? Following code taken more or less straight from the docs:

#!perl -w
use strict;
use IO::All;

# create server
my $socket = io('localhost:1080')->fork->accept;

print "Connection opened\n";

# slurp incoming data
my $xml = $socket->slurp;

print "Data recieved:\n";
print $xml;
[download]

Update: I used port number to 1080, so you don't need to run this as root.