Will this cause my program to wait indefinitely for something to come through from the socket before executing any further code below it?

If the socket is blocking then it could potentially wait forever, however if it's non-blocking then there'll be no waiting. To switch the behaviour of a socket you should be able to use the blocking() method inherited from IO::Handle e.g

$socket->blocking( 1 );
[download]

Will turn on non-blocking for $socket. See perlipc and IO::Handle for more info.
HTH

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broquaint