Hello Monks, Forgive the title, I would welcome more descriptive titles. I have a vendor application that requires that I telnet to the server/port to control certain functions. I want to automate some functions but seem to be running into some issues. There are 2 commands I want to feed to the program, status and exit. Interactivly this works fine. I type "status" and it lists data. I can type list any number of times. Once I type exit, the telnet session exits. I was hoping to keep the session open and simply type status for as long as I need, then type exit. But instead I seem to have to establish a new session each time. I would appreciate any pointers. Code

use IO::Socket::INET;

my $port = 10405;
my $host = 'server';

my $socket =  IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr  => "$host",
                                    PeerPort  => $port,
                                    Proto     => "tcp",
                                    timeout   => 3,
                                    Type      => SOCK_STREAM) || die "
+Could not establish connection : $!\n";

#$SIG{ALRM} = sub { print $socket "exit\n" };

my $header = <$socket>;
print $socket "status";
#alarm(1);
while(<$socket>) {
   chomp;
   print "$_\n";
}
print "out of loop\n";
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However when I run it from the script below it hangs. I belive it is because I am waiting for input on my socket, but none ever comes. To get around this, I set an alarm for 1 second then print exit In the current form, it hangs for ever. If I uncomment the alarm parts, it works fine.