Thanks for being frank and straight with me.

My apology and I realized that part of the confusion is that, there are two select functions in Perl, and that might be part of the problem in the original program. I don't want to guess whether he used the right select, or the wrong select.

Any way, it is worth to mention that: 1) The first type of select takes a file handler as parameter, and does what Thelonius described; 2) A second one is the select system call, which determines whether the socket is ready for certain actions (this is what I meant in my original reply, and this one does not work for windows.)

Great, we have all straightened something!

Using select call in this context made me right the way rushing to the interpretation that he was making the system call...;-) well maybe he was.

Anyway autoflush is a major part of the problem, so 1) do autoflush; or 2) $|++; or 3) \n...