problem with IO::Socket TCP connection

I am trying to write a simple IO::Socket connection in perl. However, I am running into some problems. Here is the code on the server side:

    my $listener = 
      IO::Socket::INET->new( LocalPort => 8000, Listen => 1, Reuse => 1 );

    die "Can't create socket for listening: $!" unless $listener;
    print "Listening for connections on port 8000\n";

    while(1) {
      while ($client = $listener->accept()) {
        while ( <$client>) {
            my @arguments = split(/ /, $_ );
            my $result = "something" ;# here we do something in my code
            warn $result;
            print $client $result;
            close $client;
        }   
      }
    }

And the client code:

use IO::Socket;
my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
        PeerAddr => 'xx.xxx.xxx.xxx',
        PeerPort => '8000',
        Proto => 'tcp',
);
die "Could not create socket: $!\n" unless $sock;
$sock->autoflush(1);
print $sock "somethin something";
print "sent\n";
while ( <$sock> ) { print }
close $sock;

My problem now is that the data seems to be only sent from the client to teh sever when I close the client Perl program. I get the "sent" message on the client side, but the "something" message on the server side does not appear until after I have manually closed the client side.

Also, I want to get the server response. Thus far, since I have to close the script manually, the response does not et to the client side.

Can anyone help?