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.

OP here. Hmmm I was thinking. Maybe writing a script (in Perl or some other language) that would act like telnet would be a good start. Most people seem to concentrate on sending commands to the server through pre-specified strings in the sript itself rather than allowing the user to type whatever the hell he wants. So far I couldn't find anything with google but I'm still searching.