#!C:/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
my $cvs_version = sprintf "%d.%03d", q$Revision: 1.4 $ =~ /(\d+)\.(\d+)/;

use IO::Socket;
my ($host, $port, $kidpid, $handle, $line);

unless (@ARGV == 2) { die "usage: $0 host port" }
($host, $port) = @ARGV;

$handle = IO::Socket::INET->new(
        Proto     => "tcp",
        PeerAddr  => $host,
        PeerPort  => $port,
        Timeout   => .1,     # this seems to have no improvement on my problem...
        #Blocking  => 1,     # if this is enabled Perl dies with "Bad file descriptor"
      ) or die "can't connect to port $port on $host: $!";

my $num = 'a';  #just proving that ioctl has infact changed this to undef after running...
$num = ioctl($handle, 0x8004667e, 1);   
print "ioctl return code was [$num]\n";
#with or without the ioctl statement, reading from the socket... 
#... eventually blocks if nothing is there to be read...
       
$handle->autoflush(1); 
print STDERR "[Connected to $host:$port]\n";

die "can't fork: $!" unless defined($kidpid = fork());

if ($kidpid) {     # parent copies the socket to standard output
    $| = 1; #set STDOUT to non-buffered to demonstrate that two way... 
            # ...communication is possible up until there is nothing left to read.
    my $buff;
    while (1){
        my $num = sysread($handle, $buff, 4);   #if there are zero bytes waiting, the sysread appears ...
        if ($num >= 4) {                        #... to block, and even blocks the child thread from writing to $handle...
            print $buff;
        }
        else {
            print "buffer is [$num] bytes big\n";
        }
        sleep 1;
    }
    warn "Read from buffer stopped...\n";
    kill("TERM" => $kidpid);       
}
else {         # child copies standard input to the socket
    while (defined ($line = <STDIN>)) {
        chomp $line;
        warn "echo before send: [$line]\n";
        print $handle "$line\n";
        warn "echo after send: [$line]\n";
    }
}
exit;