[ILUG] uneducated perl print question

[Kevin Brennan]

Would appreciate if any perl users could enlighten me on this one

I never write scripts in perl (actually I hardly ever write scripts in 
anything), however I need a small script which telnets to a server and 
prints some data, I have another script which does similar and is 
written in perl so I though the simplest thing would be a slight mod.

I want to capture the telnet output to a string, so do as follows

$output = $tn->waitfor('/Monitor/i');
print $output;

The printed output of this is a '1'
However it should not be a '1', it should be a string of data.
But when I print directly, as follows, I get the correct string.

print $tn->waitfor('/Monitor/i');

When I check an example (shown below - full here 
http://www.perlfect.com/articles/telnet.shtml)
it's similar to my original - what's my mistake ?

<snip>
$output = $telnet->waitfor('/\$ $/i');
print $output;
</snip>