I have cobbled together a primitive server, directly from the cookbook. It works, as long as only one client is connected. Being greedy, I would to have the program accept more than one connection.

"Ah-ha!", sez I,"This must be where non-blocking IO comes in". I read up on non-blocking IO, and this seems to be totally wrong.

But, while reading about non-blocking IO, I come across the idea of servers forking off processes to handle the details.
I've made a few attempts on this, but I can still maintain only one connection. Could someone elucidate me on this concept?
Below is the script that I'm using as a "base", and as a final note, I'm working on win32 (with fork capabilities, so that's not the issue, mmkay? :) ) 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use IO::Socket;
use Net::hostent;            # for OO version of gethostbyaddr
$PORT = 23;                  # pick something not in use
$crlf = "\015\012";
$server = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto     => 'tcp',
                                LocalPort => $PORT,
                                Listen    => 10, #SOMAXCONN,
                                Reuse     => 1);
die "can't setup server" unless $server;
print "[Server $0 accepting clients]\n";
while ($client = $server->accept()) {
    $client->autoflush(1);
    print $client "Welcome to $0; type help for command list.$crlf";
    $hostinfo = gethostbyaddr($client->peeraddr);
    printf "[Connect from %s]\n", $hostinfo->name || $client->peerhost
+;
    print $client "Command? $crlf";
    while ( <$client>) {
        print "got $_";;
        next unless /\S/;       # blank line
        if    (/quit|exit/i)    { last;                               
+      }
        elsif (/date|time/i)    { printf $client "%s$crlf", scalar loc
+altime;  }
        elsif (/who/i )         { print  $client $client->peerhost,$cr
+lf;         }
        elsif (/cookie/i )      { print  $client "cookie$crlf"; }
        elsif (/motd/i )        {print "showing motd\n"; print  $clien
+t "motd$crlf";      }
        else {
            print $client "Commands: quit date who cookie motd$crlf";
        }
    } continue {
      print $client "Command? $crlf";
    }
    close $client;
}

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In reply to Creating a server that accepts more than one client. by boo_radley

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