I'd like to thank everyone for their speedy and very helpful replies. This was probably the best lesson in perl that I've ever gotten. Books are good, but they aren't the same as collaboration.

With your help my script now looks like this:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @machines = ('ldap0.slb.com','ldap.slb.com','ldap2.slb.com');
foreach my $machine (@machines) {
    my $response = `ping -l 64 -n 1 $machine`;
    my $output .= "$machine: $response";
    print "$output\n";
}
[download]

Now I just need to work on parsing out the garbage I don't want with regexen. : (

Thanks again,
protos