Anyway, I think the part your missing might be found in "perldoc Tk::fileevent" -- this allows Tk to continue with its own event loop (for handling user inputs at the GUI), while also watching for activity on an open file handle or socket.

The basic idea is that when Tk is running the GUI, you don't do " while <INP_HANDLE> { ... }" anywhere in the code, unless your intent is to read the given handle all the way to EOF before handling any other GUI activity. Instead, you open your handle (file or socket), create a handler callback to read from that handle whenever Tk detects available input on the handle, deal with that event, and hand control back to the Tk event loop (until it detects more input on the handle).

(I haven't used it much myself, so I'm not the best person to offer sample code, but the docs should be clear enough...)

Do you have any Tk code that shows how to work with threads? I hear it not easy and I would love to see it work...maybe post it as a snippet as it will be helpful to others wanting to attempt it???

1. i usually do, i just wrote that more as the 'beta'.
2. already done. see code below.

use strict;
use IO::Socket;
use IO::Select;

my $listen = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto => 'tcp',
                   LocalPort => 9192,
                   Listen => 1,
                   Reuse => 1) or die $!;

my $select = IO::Select->new($listen);

my @ready;
while(@ready = $select->can_read) {
    my $socket;
    for $socket (@ready) {

    if($socket == $listen) {
        my $new = $listen->accept;
        $select->add($new);
        print $new->fileno . ": connected\n";
    } else {
        my $line="";
        $socket->recv($line,80);
        if($line eq "") {
        print $socket->fileno . ": disconnected\n";
        $select->remove($socket);
        $socket->close;
        };
        my $socket;
        for $socket ($select->handles) {
        next if($socket==$listen);
        $socket->send($line) or do {
            print $socket->fileno . ": disconnected\n";        
            $select->remove($socket);
            $socket->close;
        };
        }
    }
    }
}
[download]

god bless select().

sorry, that^ was me. and esskar- i didn't think i did such a bad job on my tk.

How do I poll for input - as in:

while ($msg = <STDIN>) {}
while ($sock->recv($msg)) {}

Look up "Tk::fileevent":

      Tk::fileevent - Execute a callback when a filehandle
      becomes readable or writable

SYNOPSIS
      $widget->fileevent(fileHandle,readable?,callback?)

      $widget->fileevent(fileHandle,writable?,callback?)

DESCRIPTION
      This command is used to create file event handlers.  A
      file event handler is a binding between a filehandle and a
      callback, such that the callback is evaluated whenever the
      filehandle becomes readable or writable.  File event han
      dlers are most commonly used to allow data to be received
      from another process on an event-driven basis, so that the
      receiver can continue to interact with the user while

I wrote one of these in Java a year ago...mainly because of Java's good (IMHO) thread support. You really will need threads to make this work. Threads for

• Incoming
• Outgoing
• Who's Online (possibly)
• Any other things you want to persistently monitor.. ie ping ponging the server occasionally to exit gracefully if you have a disconnect

• each connection
• and a listener thread for initiating new connections and logging them