When I played like this it was writing a SMTP and POP module (just cause it was a good exercise)..

#
# initialization 
#
$self->{'sock'} = IO::Socket::INET->new(
   args => 'go_here',
) || die "Cant create socket\nReason: $!\n";
#
#retrieval for use 
#
$sock = $obj->_get_sock();

sub _get_sock {
   return($_[0]->{'sock'});
}
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I honestly shouldn't be playing like that, cause I'm not quite sure how it works, only simply that it does. So I am assuming you could do something similar by storing it in a hash or even in an array and passing the hash/array around and then pulling the reference to the socket back out of the data structure.

Hopefully someone more wizardly will explain what is going on. I believe that the IO::Socket returns a object, which is really just a blessed reference to a data structure. So you should be able to say.

$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(
   args => 'go_here',
) || die "blah\n$!\n";

$sock_ref = \$sock;

some_func($sock_ref);

sub some_func {
   $ref = shift;
   $sock = ${$ref};

   $line = <$sock>;
}
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Edit: I should clarify a little I guess, I do know how the code works, and what I am passing around, and even what is going on in _get_sock, Im just not overly familiar with OOP. I use it, but I don't understand all of the inner workings of perl OOP, and there are better ways to play with sockets. It was simply a shotgun approach, which proved I could prototype what I wanted and get a working model. I probably should have read your code, as opposed to simply assuming you wanted to know how to pass a socket around.

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */