Thanks for the help! Strangely enough, when I copied the code I had posted (which was an edited version of my full test code), it worked correctly. Still not sure why my first version was failing.

I had avoided $pipe->getline($fh) because the documentation said it behaved like <$fh> and I was under the impression that select (even IO::Select) and <> were incompatible. Now that I think about it, behaving like <> and actually being <> are two different things. So, now I've converted my production code to use IO::Pipe and now have a whole new set of problems :)

Thanks again for your assitance.