share socket connections amongst multiple threads?

Elijah has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have ran into an issue while creating a hash of socket id's and trying to share them across multiple threads. I get the error "Invalid value for shared scalar" due to the fact that the usage I have is trying to share an object reference (the socket id ref). This of course is not allowed but I can not think of an alternative to make this work.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use threads;
use threads::shared;
use IO::Socket::INET;

my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET (
                                 LocalHost => 'localhost',
                                 LocalPort => '12345',
                                 Proto => 'tcp',
                                 Listen => 10,
                                 Blocking => 1,
                                );
die "Could not create socket: $!\n" unless $sock;

my($thread, $cnt);
my %usersocks : shared;
while (my $UserSock = $sock->accept()) {
   $cnt++;
   $thread = threads->create(\&connection, $UserSock, $cnt);
}

$_->join for threads->list;

sub connection {
   my ($sockID, $cnt) = @_;
   my $sockData;

   lock(%usersocks);
   $usersocks{$cnt} = $sockID;
   while($sockID->recv($sockData, 1024)) {
      print $sockData;

      #debug code to see contents of hash
      while(my($key, $value) = each(%usersocks)) {
         print "$key => $value\n";
      }

      $usersocks{$_}->send($sockData) for sort(keys %usersocks);
   }

   close($sockID);
   delete $usersocks{$sockID};
}
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The line $usersocks{$cnt} = $sockID; is of course my issue because $sockID is the obj reference to the connection id. Is there a way of accomplishing this? I ultimately want all data sent to this server application to be sent out to all threaded clients.

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