understood but so if the plain sysread is called, then what confused me a lot is that another app required a derivative of this code where SSL must be used to 'top' is inheriting from both 'remote' and 'IO::Socket::SSL' (I had to do that because I cannot modify the 'remote' class, I can only touch the descendant 'top') class

base qw (IO::Socket::SSL remote);
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With that, method calls will always try to be resolved in IO::Socket::SSL first, before going to IO::Socket::INET - this might be ugly and there might be a clean way to do that, I just don't know
But although this works, now what happens is that the plain sysread (made in sysreadline) uses the overloaded sysread method in 'top'???