I'm converting a program that uses sockets like file descriptors {it does a <$ssh> to read a line. UGH} to using sockets properly. And I can't find a clear tutorial. I know the command to send data in my new regime is send($socket, <stuff>, flags). But I've tried to chase down what the flags are. perldoc unhelpfully just says "Takes the same flags as the system call of the same name.". First off, that seems to presume that you have a unix handy to check on the system call. Second, what I found was 
$ man 2 send
No manual entry for send in section 2

[download]
so I have no clue what the flags do, but the tutorials seem to all give a value of 0. ??

But my real interest in the switchover is to get reads to time out. I have a pokey host I connect to; sometimes {annoyingly regularly} the server seems to balk and my program just hangs, dead in the water, on the <$server>. So what I'd like to do is use the socket timeout mechanism to let my program continue. I see that there's a Timeout parameter that unhelpfully just says "Timeout value for various operations". ?? Units?? {I'd have guessed milliseconds, but IO::Socket says it is in seconds, which makes sense} which operations?? what happens when the timeout value is reached??

Also, my incoming data is line-at-a-time and so the <$ssh> is perfect for what I need. Is there an equivalent way to do that with IO::Socket? I guess I could recv a character at a time until I got a newline.

In reply to IO::Socket tutorial by BernieC

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