Well, the FAQ is misleading (*sigh*). Perl does support unbuffered I/O via syswrite and sysread. Perhaps they meant that Perl doesn't support unbuffered I/O via other functions such as print and printf (except that you can have the buffer autoflushed as described).

<Update> And the difference between unbuffered and "command buffered" (as the FAQ calls it) is pretty subtle and usually unimportant so you might as well use "command buffered" for most things. The only time that I think it matters is that you can get into trouble by mixing buffered and unbuffered I/O to/from the same file handle. Nothing external to your script should be able to tell the difference between the two. </update>

In particular, you don't have to specify a write length of 1 in order for syswrite to be unbuffered. Also, I encourage you to just leave the length argument off and write syswrite(WHOIS,$write).

By writing things one byte at a time, your data might get sent with as few as one byte per packet. I could see this confusing a poorly written server.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: syswrite strange behaviour on some systems by tye
in thread syswrite strange behaviour on some systems by dash2

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