irc via telnet, how to auto-pong?

Hello.

I'm using irc via telnet to learn more about the raw protocol. Everything runs smoothly except one thing that I find annoying. I need to reply to ping with pong <message from ping> every time the server requests it, otherwise it will disconnect me (ping timeout). Because of this I can't idle out and need to pay attention to ping requests. I'm trying to find some way to still use telnet normally only to make those pong replies more automatic so I can do something else. I tried googling and asking around on irc channels, but to no success so far. Any ideas? I'm connecting from a *nix server.

>>3
Write a program that connects to the specified address and port, and puts all data it receives on stdout, and sends all data it gets on stdin, except when it receives a server PING message, in which case it doesn't echo to stdout, and silently replies with a PONG.