Thanks for all the great links, here's the code I have now, as a very basic example to anyone who might find this thread:

use IO::Socket::INET;

my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    'PeerAddr' => '192.168.1.100',
    'PeerPort' => 29900,
    'Proto'    => 'udp',
    'Timeout' => 15
);
$socket->autoflush(1);
$socket->send($query);
$socket->recv(my $response, 1024 * 5);
print $response;
[download]

The only thing I'm worried about is that the first time I tried this, I was downloading something and the script just hung without returning anything. This is going to be going on a shared server, so I'm worried about hogging resources. Is there any way to guarantee that the script won't wait too long for the information?