Reading and Concat'ing lines until specific value found in Perl

Morning SO,

I'm working on redesigning a Perl script designed by an external software vendor. It uses Perl, which I've never written in before. Basically all it does is read a line in, and then send a syslog packet to the a destination host containing that line. I need to modify it so Perl will keep reading and concat'ing until it reaches "". The problem is, it loops on the first line of a given file, and therefore never reaches the send stage. Any guidance on this? I went back and read the original script again, and it doesn't look to have a mechanism for iterating through each line.

Edit: OK - so apparently I've gone stupid and can't understand basic iterative logic. Fixed the looping problem, now to fix the syslog sending problem. It reads the data in correctly, but never executes the syslog send request, which implies it's not getting into the if statements.

Program should eventually enter here: if($lineRead eq $check){//do something;}

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use warnings;

use lib qw(.);
use lib qw(<removed>);

use Syslog;
use Time::HiRes qw( time sleep usleep );
use Getopt::Std;

# create log entries at a fixed rate (n per sec)
# Option defautls

my $me = $0;
$me =~ s|.*/||;

my %options = (
        d       =>      "127.0.0.1",     # host
        p       =>      514,             # port
        f       =>      "readme.syslog", # filename
        b       =>      0,               # burst
        v       =>      0,               # verbose
        t       =>      0,               # tcp vs. udp
        l       =>      0,               # loop option
#       u       =>      "127.0.0.2",     # new IP to send
);

my $theProto='tcp';

# Help
sub HELP_MESSAGE {
        print <<EOF;
$me [-d <host>] [-p <port>] [-f filename] [-u <IP>] [-l] [-t] [-b] [-n NAME] [-v] <messages per second>
Options:
-d : destination syslog host (default 127.0.0.1)
-p : destination port (default 514)
-f : filename to read (default readme.syslog)
-b : burst the same message for 20% of the delay time
-t : use TCP instead of UDP for sending syslogs
-v : verbose, display lines read in from file
-n : use NAME for object name in syslog header
-l : loop indefinately
-u : use this IP as spoofed sender (default is NOT to send IP header)
EOF
}

getopts('vbtlu:d:p:n:f:', \%options);

unless (@ARGV) {
        print STDERR "Need an event rate.\n";
        HELP_MESSAGE;
        exit 1;
}

my $nmsg = shift @ARGV;

if (!($nmsg =~ /^\d+$/)) {
        print "Invalid number of messages per second.\n";
        HELP_MESSAGE;
        exit 1;
}

if ($options{t}) { $theProto='tcp'; }

my $syslog = new Syslog(
        name     => $options{n},        # prog name for syslog header
        facility => 'local6',
        priority => 'info',
        loghost  => $options{d},
        port     => $options{p},
        proto    => $theProto,
);

sub doitall() { # for purpose of infinate looping

open(F,$options{f}) or die("Unable to open file: $options{f}\n");

print STDERR "generating $nmsg messages per second to $options{d}:$options{p}\n";
print STDERR "Ctrl-c to stop\n";

# delay in milliseconds
my $delay = 1.0/$nmsg;
my $resolution = 0.2;
my $burst = $nmsg * $resolution;

my $check = "</Event>";
my $lineRead;
my $payload="a";
if ($options{b}) {
    print "Sending $burst messages every ", int ($delay * 1000), "ms\n";
}

while (<F>) {
        #print $lineRead;
        if ($options{v}) {
            print "Read in: $_\n";
        }
        $lineRead=$_;
        if($lineRead eq $check){
                $payload = join $payload, $lineRead;
                if ($options{b}) {
                    for (my $i = 0 ; $i < $burst; $i++) {
                        if ($options{u}) { print $payload; $syslog->send($payload, host=> $options{u}); }
                        else { print $payload; $syslog->send($payload); }
                 }
                } else {
                 if ($options{u}) { print $payload; $syslog->send($payload, host=> $options{u}); }
                 else { print $payload; $syslog->send($payload); }
                }
                if ($delay > 0) {
                        if ($options{v}) {
                            print "waiting for ", int($delay * 1000), "ms ...\n";
                        }
                        usleep (1000000*$delay);
                }
                $lineRead = "a";
                $payload = "a";
        }
        else{
                $payload = join $payload, $lineRead;
        }
}

close(F);
} # end of the subroutine

if ($options{l}) {
        while (1) { doitall(); }
} else { doitall(); }
exit 0;