Since TStanley wasn't using double-quotes, but single-quotes, what was actually being sent by cmd was "1\\n\n", or, literally, 1\n followed by a line-terminator. The other end would compare that against "1", "2", and "3", find it didn't match any, and try again.

Changing it to double quote as you said would send two newlines, which I doubt the other end would play nice with. I think the solution is to just use $NT->cmd(1), but I've not tested that.