Maybe you want to test your code outside of your irc bot, in a short program that you can also post, so we can also try it to see where it goes wrong?

Also, have you considered Bot::BasicBot or the other Bot modules that CPAN provides instead of rolling your own?

if i included the code the post would be massive.

No one wants all the code, massive or otherwise. What Monks like to see is small, self-contained, runnable example code (along with input and desired output) demonstrating the problem. You actually provided such an example in your OP, and this is the code (and data) to which davido and I responded. Please see How do I post a question effectively?, How (Not) To Ask A Question and perhaps even I know what I mean. Why don't you?.

-code to answer the question.

But that doesn't answer the question because we cannot duplicate the data stream from the  $sock handle. All we can do is fake some data by assigning a string to the  $input or  $str variables — as you did in the example code in your OP and I did in my original reply.

It seems likely that you aren't getting the data in the exact format you're expecting. Try adding some debugging lines:

while (my $input = <$sock>) {
  print "input line: **start**$input**end**\n";  # debugging
        if (index($input, "/QUOTE") != -1) {
  print "    is a match\n";  # debugging
           my $str = $input;
           ($pass) = $str  =~ m{/QUOTE\sPASS\s(.*?)$};
           print $sock "QUOTE PASS $pass\r\n";
        } else {
  print "    not a match\n"  # debugging
        }
}
[download]

One thing I notice is that you're both reading from and writing to the filehandle in $sock. That might be possible if that's a particular kind of object, but it definitely won't work if it's a normal pipe or filehandle, so it might be a mistake.