Sure, you can connect directly to them using sockets, or you can run a session on a pty. In either case, Randal's chat2 package, which is distributed with the perl source, will come in handly. It address much the same problem space as Don Libes's expect package does. This is a bug in 4.035. While in general it's merely a cosmetic problem, it often comanifests with a highly undesirable coredumping problem.
Programs known to be affected by the fatal coredump include plum and pcops.
Since perl5 is pretty much a total rewrite, we can count on it being fixed then, but if anyone tracks down the coredump problem before then, a significant portion of the Perl world would rejoice. Not knowing how big a format is going to be until you evaluate it is one of the major problems. Not very convenient, but doable. Larry reports that this behavior is fixed for perl5. Yes, you can, since Perl has access to sockets.