Oooh.. I like that. Here's another tack at that last bit of code, that'll probably be more memory efficient in the long run:

while (@handles) {
  @handles = grep {
    if (defined(my $line = readline($_))) {
      print $line; 1;
    } else { 0 }
  } @handles;
}
[download]

The advantage here is that we're rewriting @handles in one fell swoop in the fairly strongly optimized grep operation, not constantly shifting and pushing on an array that will just keep wandering through higher and higher memory. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker