You can hack up a tied filehandle, which is actually a scalar (there are prolly a gazillion out there):

package Scandle;

sub TIEHANDLE { my ($buffer, $pos); bless [ $buffer, $pos],shift };
sub WRITE { my $self = shift; $self->PRINT($#_ ? substr($_[0],0,$_[1])
+ : $_[0] ); }

sub PRINT {
    my $self = shift;
    my $write = shift;
    if ($self->[1] != length($self->[0]){
        if (length($write) > length($self->[0])-$self->[1]){
            substr($self->[0],$self->[1],length($_[0])-$self->[1],'');
        } else {
            substr($self->[0],$self->[1],length($write),$write);
            $self->[1] += length($write);
            return 1;
        }
    }
    
    $self->[0] .= $write;
    $self->[1] = length($self->[0])
}
[download]

this should take care of most of it... emulate whatever more you need. untested.

-nuffin
zz zZ Z Z #!perl