To do what you want, you pretty much have to abandon system() and get into running the sub-command with filehandles attached to the sub-command's STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR. ....

... dig ... dig ... dig....

Check out perlipc, IPC::Open2 and IPC::Open3 for more about that.

No chance you can pass the inital info to the sub-process as arguments, is there? That would make it really simple.

Anyone out there got a better idea?

--Pileofrogs

Update:

Woah... there were no replies when I started typing...

paladin's recommendation about Expect is probably a better solution than mine, though you should still read perlipc.