Thank you for both of your replies.

The usage of srand was an artifact from before I put the code into sub outer. Thank you for reminding me to remove it!

I am putting the use statement inside the sub because I want to eventually make the sub into an object method. I don't want to require the main program to know that it should use IO::Socket if it wants to use this method. When I move the sub into the package file, I will remove the use statement from the sub itself and put it into the package file.