What kind of server are you connecting to, and is there a protocol involved (like HTTP) to get the data? Or does the data just start coming once you make a connection?

Making socket connections is easy with the IO::Socket::INET module:

use IO::Socket::INET;

my $hostname = "localhost";
my $port = 19;

$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new("$hostname:$port")
  or die "unable to connect: $!\n";
while (<$sock>) {
  ... # process line of data here
}
close($sock);
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