perldoc -f gethostbyname is a little confusing, since it gloms together docs for several functions.

It does, however, point you towards the Socket module (perldoc Socket). The Socket module buys you the handy inet_ntoa() function, as well as other helpful functions and constants.

Maybe this snippet will help a bit:

use Socket;
$ip = gethostbyname("www.cnn.com");
$string = inet_ntoa($ip);
print $string . "\n";
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