I could not find my original post yesterday, so I generated another one. I resolved my problem using one of your suggestions. I complicated things a bit by needing to encrypt the string sent by the client. The encrypted string provides a variety of characters so I "pack(u*, $string)" the string. Since "^end\n" is not something you will see in the uuencoded string, I attached it from the client and I used it to break from the loop:

while ($string = <stdin>) {
last if $string =~ /^end\n/;
$msg .= $queuestr;
}

Thanks again for everyones input.

evilstevel