I setup a socket to continuously grab input from a stream until the session is disconnected. I've been told that there is a possibility that a session may stay up but no data will go through or gibberish. There is a particular heartbeat messsage that does come out after xx mins. How can I best check for that? The code I have right now will sit in the while loop until something gets fed in. Will I need to create a fork process to do this to monitor an environment variable or something easier? 
   my $sock;
   $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => $host,
                                 PeerPort => $port,
                                 Proto    => 'tcp');

   open (FILEOUT,">output.log");
   my @msgstream;
   while (<$sock>)
   {  #process line until end of socket stream
      my $line=$_;
      if ($line=~/^;/)
      { # if the line has a ';' in it
         processmsg(\@msgstream);
         undef @msgstream; #clear @msgstream
      }
      else
      { # add to msgqueue
         push @msgstream,$line;
      }
   }

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In reply to monitor tcp stream but alert if no info in xx mins by bengmau

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