I've just been looking through network programming with perl and at one point it talks about using inetd to start up a server on a machine when it gets a connection on a specific port. However the computers I have access to use xinetd, and I'm suspecting it deals with things differently. the client program always hangs whenever it has to read or write to the server (which works fine at the command line). The server has been started (shows up in ps ) and I've managed to get some stuff through (generally comes when i've sent the command to quit. but nothing before that) So I was wondering, has anyone used this? I don't want the server program running constantly, just when needed.