I've narrowed it down to a small section:

while ( <$client> ) {
  next unless /\S/;       # blank line
  if    (/quit|exit/i)    { last; }
  elsif (/microsoft/i)    {foreach $command(@commands) {
                           print $client "$command\r";
                              }
                           }
  else                     { last; }
  } continue {
  }
[download]

So, we skip empty lines; if we see "quit/exit", we close the socket, if we see "microsoft", we send a list of commands to the client, and that's where the problem crops up; I know it prints the whole list of commands to the client if the code is left like this, but I want the results of these commands, so I added:

while ( <$client> ) {
  next unless /\S/;       # blank line
  if    (/quit|exit/i)    { last; }
  elsif (/microsoft/i)    {foreach $command(@commands) {
                           print $client "$command\r";
                           while( <$client> ) { print;}
                              }
                           }
  else                     { last; }
  } continue {
  }
[download]

Now, what happens is I get ALL the output from the first command I sent to $client, but the foreach loop is no longer able to iterate through all of "@commands" because I think it's hanging in the "while" loop. I have tried various things like putting "next;" after "print;", but I either get none of the command output, or I get what I want, but only for the first command, and then the client never closes it's connection (I send "exit" as the third command). I am trying to figure out if I'm just coming at this the wrong way (I have put various print statements within the top "while" loop, as well as trying to create an array to which all output would be stored, and then print the array:

while ( <$client> ) {
  while( my @response = <$client>) {
    next unless /\S/;       # blank line
    if    (/quit|exit/i)    { last; }
    elsif (/microsoft/i)    {foreach $command(@commands) {
                             print $client "$command\r";
                               }
                             print @client;
                             }
    else                     { last; }
    } continue {
    }
  }
[download]

None of it is getting the results I want. #######################
Just in case anyone ever runs into this.. I figured it out:

... snip ...
open(LOGFILE,>>"mylog.log") or die "Can't open mylog.log\n";
print $client "$cmds\r";
while( <$client> ) {
   print LOGFILE;
   }
   close $client;
}
[download]

What I wanted to do was print commands to a netcat listener that was setup with "-e cmd.exe" (a la "reverse telnet") and capture all the output to a log file. Print commands to the socket, then do a "while( <$client>)". That seems to get the job done.

Good luck, and thanks for all the input.