See http://search.cpan.org/doc/JROGERS/Net-Telnet-3.02/lib/Net/Telnet.pm. I had the same question and hoped Galen would notice it in the chatterbox. No such luck so I looked for recent previous questions of his.

Sorry, I should have included more of the code.

use Net::Telnet ();

<--some variables defined here-->

$connect = new Net::Telnet (Telnetmode => 1);
$connect->open(Host => $hostname,
               Port => $port);

# For debugging
print "First, login with $act\n";
print "\n";

<---snip--->

print "Now for the RTRV command:\n";
print "command is $rtrv\n";
print "\n";
$connect->print("$rtrv");
(@prematch,$match) = $connect->waitfor('/COMPLD/');
while (@rlines = $connect->getlines(Timeout =>1)) {
print @rlines;
}
[download]

So, you see it uses the perl telnet.pm module. Pretty simple really, but the problem I'm having is that the data stream doesn't flow consistently, and getlines apparently believes it is finished taking data before all the data is actually retrieved. So, I repeatedly call getlines until finally one of the requests gets a blank line. At this point it times out. My problem is that I want to issue one more command after I've received all the data (I need to log out gracefully). But, when the timeout occurs, the script exits. I can't do anything further. There does appear to be a way to check the status of timed_out, which is what I need (I think). If I time out, then log out, don't just exit. Another solution may be to change the Errmode from the default of "die" to something else.

OK I figured out the problem. My last line in the reply above was what I needed to do. Change the default errmode from die to return.

    $pop = new Net::Telnet (Telnetmode => 1,
                            Errmode => "return");
[download]

Now when a timeout occurs, the loop exits and the script continues.