To be honest, I don't really understand the question...

But if there's lots of telnet-ing to be done from one processes.... POE::Component::Client::Telnet will probably help. POE does all the hard work for you. I've had a mixed relationship with POE. Sometimes I find it a little tricky, but when I'm connecting to lots of services from one process, it's really the way to go.

Basically I have a list of devices that I need to connect to on a daily basis. Using an Access Server with 30 modems I want to manage and control the utilisation of the modems. So when I finish collecting data from a device I'll close down the session and then I want a 'session controller' to start another collection process to a different device. So I utilise the modems as much as possible at all times. The modems are accessed via a pool so I use a telnet and tcp port to initiate a modem connection. Hopefully that explains the background and what I'm trying to achieve better.

If all you need to do is limit the number of simultaneous but otherwise identical connections, Parallel::ForkManager should do the trick. You might have to add a little more logic if you need to use a different target port for each connection, but that's just a pop/push stack.

my @portlist = qw/10001 10002 10003 10004/;

use Parallel::ForkManager;
$pm = Parallel::ForkManager->new(scalar @portlist);

foreach my $target (@targets) {
    my $pid = $pm->start and next; 

    my $port = pop @portlist;
    system("telnet $target $port");
    push @portlist, $port;

    $pm->finish; # Terminates the child process
}
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