I'm looking for a general clue on how Perl might be able to communicate directly with an OS, Windows98 in my case. This question comes from a problem I had yesterday trying to figure out how Perl might be able to detect a single keystroke on the keyboard. Obviously, the CPU and the OS knows that something was typed because a character appears in the terminal but Perl remains oblivious to any keyboard activity until the user presses the return key. The POSIX module apparently won't help me in this case because Windows 98 because it's not POSIX compliant, as far as I could tell.

Note that I'm not looking for any specific answers to the problem above, I'm just wondering about the big picture. How can you get Perl to interface directly with the OS? What are the tools and knowledge that you would need to make that happen?

Any pointers to tutorials, books, ect. that would be helpful to me would be much appreciated.

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$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;
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In reply to Perl and the OS by nysus

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