If you really can't determine when the server has completed its response, you can guess based on the heuristic that if the server hasn't sent any data for X number of seconds and we're at the beginning of a line then just assume the server is done sending data.

Hey thanks for your help pc88mxer. I've read through the relatively short documentation for IO::Socket::INET, and I can't get the code below to work. Unfortunately, I don't think I know enough about network programming and or perl to get much farther on my own. It's passing the unless test, and exiting. The process is running, and I can connect to it with telnet.

my @resp;
my @all_resp;

my $s = new IO::Socket::INET( PeerAddr => 'localhost', Peerport => 400
+0, Proto => 'tcp', Timeout => 4);
print "before unless";
unless ($s) { die "unable to connect..." }
sleep 1;

# we are connected, so just start sending commands

print $s "auth admin 555555\r\n";
sleep 1;
@resp = <$s>; # expect one line response
push (@all_resp, @resp);

print $s "voo allowed_ips\r\n";
sleep 1;
@resp = <$s>;
push (@all_resp, @resp);

print @all_resp;
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Like pc88mxer already said, you need to know when to stop to read. Your code

@resp = <$s>; # expect one line response
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will read from $s until your daemon stops or closes the socket, contrary to your comment that it will only read one line. Try it with the following code:

@resp = ();
while (defined $_ = <$s> and ! /^\s*$/) {
    warn "DEBUG: Got >$_<";
    push @resp, $_;
};
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The above loop will output some debug information and read until the next empty line. If something goes wrong, you will easily see that from the debug information ...