Socket client application

Hi, I've gone through several good PHP sockets tutorials, but all of them seem to focused on making socket servers. What I actually need to do is write a socket client. There's an app runnning on a distant server that accepts incoming TCP connections at such-and-such an IP address and port, and then responds to various commands and issues standard responses, etc.---I need to build the app that talks to it. Now maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but I can't find any tutorials on what such a socket client app might look like. The client I need to build must maintain the connection once started. Any ideas?? ...Rene