We offered a number of failed suggestions to this on the CB. =) Win9x makes things a bit harder. The select trick won't work well to capture keyboard input and the MS way is supposedly rather nasty for quick hacks.

I'd like to make a simple sniff for input loop to solve his question but can't do so. Is there an easier way on Win9x boxes to do keyboard capture that is non-blocking that I don't know of?

What I finally recommend is this, which I sometimes use for scripts that restart themselves with cron if they die:

open LINETO, ">./lineto.txt";
$oldfh = select(LINETO); $| = 1; select($oldfh);

for ($1 etc. etc.) {
  #do you stuff here
  ##done with stage $i?
  seek LINETO,0,0;
  print LINETO "$i\n";
  #post cleanup.
}
print LINETO, "Finito\n";
close LINETO;
[download]

But I have no idea what kind of slowdown that would add, esp. since it would depend on OS and FileSystem load.

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