Oddly enough, I went through this process just yesterday. Small world.

In my case, select didn't do the trick because I was calling a C shared object via SWIG that didn't obey my orders (and wouldn't shut up about it.) Instead, I used an old perlopentut trick which ended up looking a bit like this:

open(SAVEOUT, ">&STDOUT");
open STDOUT, ">>$serverdir/ss_log";
my $result = SmartSockets::projpoll($server_name);
print "Connection to smartsockets updated.\n";
close STDOUT;
open(STDOUT, ">&SAVEOUT");
[download]

It's not to be used other than as a last resort, but in this case the last resort was the only one that worked.