I've read a bunch documentation, I've seen it all, but for some reason its just not clicking, and its starting to get annoying.. I'm going to try to write that program I described in my post cuz it may help. See, I just wanted an example in perl along those lines since it'd be the most basic stripped down version I can think of.

who knows, it might also help someone else who's sitting there looking at $rin and $win and fileno($socket), 0, and 1, just click.
everyonce in a while there's something that no matter how many times you've read documentation, you just don't get it until someone explains it in just that right way. sorry for wasting your time.

-brad..