Thanks ikegami.   Seems plausible... (and I first went "you could've known, Almut, you were already using sysread for reading..." to myself).

But when I actually tried it, even with the code you suggested, I'm still getting a SIGPIPE (which, when uncaught, causes the script to be killed). More precisely, what I get now is

BROKEN PIPE
Unable to send data to child

[download]

(BTW, this is Perl 5.8.8 on Linux - in case it matters)

In reply to Re^2: Pipes and IO::Select's method can_write() by almut
in thread Pipes and IO::Select's method can_write() by almut

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