Your handle is a socket, so you should use recv to read from it. Rather than polling the handle, try four-arg select to allow sleep between reads. For sockets you can even do that on winders.

You can simplify usage with IO::Socket and IO::Select. It's a worthwhile exercise to code a few applications from perl builtins, though.

Code is untested

#!/user/bin/perl -w 
use strict;
use IO::Socket::INET;

sub sock_connection{
    my $sockname = new IO::Socket::INET(PeerAddr => "putAddrHere",
                                       PeerPort => "Port",
                                       Proto => "tcp") or die "cannot 
+connect to host: $!";
    print $sockname "@_" # Puts data passed to sub
    shutdown($sockname, 1);
    while(<$sockname>){
        # place regex to remove prompt message
        # Display msgs using print $_;
    }
undef $sockname
}
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if the code is called in a subroutine, like the above, you can then call the subroutine to loop through the code that you want to send to the socket.

sock_connection("my command here")
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Hope this helps?!

Edit:Added the undef to clear the socket connection when done.