Yes, The select's were for sub-second pauses. Sorry. I've probably been programming in perl too long, I don't even notice I'm using tricks like that anymore. I should have put sleep()'s in there instead to make it clear.

So you see my issue, changing the timing changes where the output goes which makes it unpredictable and dangerous. Perl isn't usually unpredictable or dangerous. Something is wrong here.

The guys who do POE seem to have gotten something like this working, although their code is all in modules so first I'd have to figure out how to get POE to do what I want, then I'd have to trace the code to see what it's doing all without knowing if it actually does work right.