What is the serial module that you are using and on what OS? If $ob is the serial object, can you not simply pull the first n characters out of it? At some point surely you end with a string or array of characters that you can process piecemeal?

Show us a little more code.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re: Counting bytes in an input stream instead of a file by GrandFather
in thread Counting bytes in an input stream instead of a file by sawtooth

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