You are supposed to call seek between calls that use the same file handle in different ways (either one reading and one writing or one buffered and one unbuffered). seek($fh,0,0) in all the right places should fix your problem.

the problem is that the reading and writing happen in separate threads, hence making "between calls" a very obscure concept in this context :-) situations might occur where reads and writes actually happen at the very same moment, in fact, it probably happens all the time the way the script is set up. It *seems* to be working fine though, but since all the docs advised against I thought I'd better go and ask if there's a more proper approach.

In that case, dup(2)ing the file handle is probably a better idea:

open IN, "<&SOCKET" or die ...;
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though selecting a suitable non-bareword file handle scheme is even better.

my $in = ...;
open $in, "<&".fileno($sock) or die ...;
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Where the first "..." depends on what you find appropriate. "undef" works for modern versions of Perl. Or you can use IO::Handle or other module or just do { local(*IN); \*IN }.

- tye        

This doesn't matter. You will have a problem if you do non-buffered and buffered read at the same time, or non-buffered and buffered write at the same time. But a mixture of non-buffered write with buffered read, not a problem at all. Internally, there are two un-related pools.