Doing select for ordinary files won't do you any good. Disk files (as opposed to sockets and pipes) are always "ready for reading".

I suggest you look at the code for File::Tail. While I never wrote any hooks to tell the calling program when there was no traffic in the file, I do handle it internaly and you could add it to the code fairly easily.

Send me a patch once it's done, and if it's fairly clean, I'll include it in the next release. (Note, I suggest a callback for implementing that).