I have a script which has been working wonderfully for about a week now while I have been developing around it. Unfortunately it is now hanging. The script is as follows: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use strict;
use IO::Socket;
use HTML::Entities;

require './libraryCommon.pl';

unless (@ARGV) { die "Exiting without parameter.  (HINT: You need to p
+ass the I\
SBN)\n"; }

unless (testISBN($ARGV[0])) {
    my $host="xml.amazon.com";
    my $port=80;

    my $buff="";
    my $line;
    my $title="";
    my $date="";
    my $manufacturer="";
    my $author="";

    my $count=0;

    my $isbn=$ARGV[0];
    my $getBook="GET http://$host/onca/xml2?t=webservices-20&dev-t=D3N
+1ICFCFE4DHV&AsinSearch=$isbn&type=lite&f=xml  HTTP/1.0\n\n";

    my $sock=new IO::Socket::INET(PeerAddr => $host, PeerPort => $port
+, Proto => 'tcp') or die "Couldn't connect to $host";

    $sock->autoflush(1);
    print $sock $getBook;

    $count=0;

    print <$sock>;
    while (<$sock>) {
        print "looping. \n";
        decode_entities($_);
        print $_, "\n";
        if (m%<ProductName>(.*?)</ProductName>%) { $title = $1 }
        elsif (m%<Author>(.*?)</Author>%) {
            $author[$count]=$1;
            $count++;
        }
        elsif (m%<ReleaseDate>.*, (\d\d\d\d)</ReleaseDate>%) { $date=$
+1; }
        elsif (m%<Manufacturer>(.*?)<\/Manufacturer>%) { $manufacturer
+=$1; }
    }

    close($sock);

    print $title, "\n";
    foreach $author (@author) { print $author, "\n" };
    print $date, "\n";
    print $manufacturer, "\n";
}
else { die "Exiting due to the fact that you have supplied an invalid 
+ISBN."; }

[download]

I have tested the code through and everything is fine except the "while(<$sock>){}" loop. If I remove this loop the script simple runs to completion. With this loop in place the script hangs. Any print statements that I put in the loop are not displayed.

I have tried directly connecting to: here, which does seem to produce a lovely page of XML information about the book requested.

Why would my script hang while trying to read this page? Any suggestions?

~~Guildencrantz

In reply to Reading an XML page by Guildencrantz

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