I, too, am a little fuzzy on how the select loop system works. Select just chooses the current FH, so how can I use that to buffer the input stream?

Also, once I have my stream buffered, could you or someone please provide a small bit of sample code for how to set up a child process? To date, my strength has been processing text files - not fancy pants networking or multiple threads!

I just tried the code below, but am beginning to understand that because the reading takes more time than it does to play 512 bytes worth of data, I get the interrupted playback. In fact, this code has also somehow corrupted the audio stream so that it plays a tone of some sort, rather like cartoon car horn sound. Learning how to set up a child process to smoothly feed aplay would really help me out!

# build up a buffer
sysread(CLIENT, $read_buffer, 2048);
syswrite(AUDIO_OUT, $read_buffer);

# with buffer established, stream as usual
while ( sysread(CLIENT, $read_buffer, 512) ) {
    $buffer .= $read_buffer;
    syswrite( AUDIO_OUT, $buffer, 512);
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Thanks for your help so far. Cheers!

--------------------------

Some while later:

I've been reading and learned that threads are different from child processes. It would seem as if a thread would serve me best, since I don't want copies of all the filehandles and stuff. Is this correct? The code I have doesn't seem to execute the child code...

my $child_pid;
if ( not defined($child_pid = fork()) ) {
    die "cannot fork: $!";
} elsif ($child_pid) {
    # I'm the parent
    # keep reading the stream
    while ( sysread(CLIENT, $read_buffer, 512) ) {
        $buffer .= $read_buffer;
        print ".";
    }
} else {
    # I'm the child
    # with buffer established, stream as usual
    while ( $buffer ) {
        syswrite( AUDIO_OUT, $buffer, 512);
        print "-";
    }
    exit;
}
waitpid($child_pid, 0);
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