Using the <> way of reading from a socket means you're using buffered reading, which is a bad idea when using select, or in this case IO::Select. Instead I would recommend using sysread() to do the actual reading. Now, the nice thing about sysread() is that every time it does a read, it returns the amount of bytes actually read in. So if you were to do for example: 
my $scalar;
my $bytes = sysread(FILEHANDLE, $scalar, 1024);

[download]
and $bytes turns out to be less than 1024, then it's a pretty safe assumption that there's nothing left. If on the other hand you get the full 1024 you can just go ahead and do another read, and so on, and so on.

Remember rule one...

In reply to Re^3: forked kid can't read from IO::Select->can_read by Forsaken
in thread forked kid can't read from IO::Select->can_read by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.