I never said your syntax was incorrect. You should not be passing 0 as the third argument for F_GETFL.

Update: isotope mentioned to me that newer versions of the ioctl POD do exactly as you have done. Well, I get suspicious of an examples in ioclt POD that are for the wrong function, and it didn't look like anyone was trying what I suggested. So I tried the different methods of doing F_GETFL (one from fcntl, one from ioctl) on an ancient Unix system that was handy and the one from ioctl was correct (on that Unix system), but it also didn't exhibit the original problems in this thread. So I suspect that the usage of F_GETFL varies between versions of Unix.

In any case, one or both of the fcntl/ioctl PODs could use some updates when we figure this out. (:

                - tye