Try adding a newline after the socket print, that forces it to send(flush). Otherwise, it will tend to accumulate the sent data in a buffer for efficiency. Search groups.google.com for "perl socket flush" for other methods. The newline is the simplest, but there are modules which turn on auto-flushing.

print $sock $line,"\n"; #out tcp 
print $sock "$line\n"; #out tcp
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