My first thought when I saw your question was IO || IO. Maybe this comes from C experience. But would IO::Socket, IO::Pipe, IO::Select, or IO::Poll give you a sufficient handle to work with across different platforms? Or is it not low level enough?

Best wishes

--Chris

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;