It has become apparent that telnet can not function as a scripting tool for jabber for many reasons. This discussion highlights some of them so I won't re-hash them at this point. The suggestion is to use netcat. In Gentoo 'emerge netcat' and in other distros you may need to find a package called nc instead of netcat. Information on netcat can be found on their site at http://netcat.sourceforge.net/. Once I get a firmer understanding of how to use netcat in Jabber scripting I'll fill you folks in. If someone else would like to write this up before I get to it, feel free. :-)