Ten lines of shell script is easier to maintain than 70 lines of perl.
It's also faster to develop.

Experienced sysadmins use shell scripts, then use perl/ruby/python when they cannot do whatever...

It means that the dirlog variable contains a string literal value. The value is randomdir.log

The other two statements are attempting to:
1. to append (add-on to the end of) a file
2. read from...

If the box in question a unix box, try setting up a signal handler - with use sigtrap

alarm() is supposed to send a SIGALRM to the process, which by default terminates.
Unless another handler...

chris - you're correct. Perl is overkill which I guess was my point to start with.
3 lines of awk:

awk ' BEGIN {connected=-1}
$2 ~ /^connected/ {connected*=-1 ; continue}
...

If this is any version of unix:
grep -v "connected" filename > newfile
deletes all of the lines having the word: connected

You need to look at expect rather than trying to use perl.
expect is used for automating interactive dialogues.