Non-blocking network IO in Perl?

William G. Davis has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks. Can any Perl networking gurus help me out here?

I'm trying to do non-blocking network IO in Perl.

I need to be able to create a few sockets and try to connect each one in a non-blocking way. Each connect attempt will then be checked periodically, and the sockets that get connected successfully will be added to a list. I then need to periodically select() the connected sockets from the list to check for readability and writability, and do non-blocking reads and non-blocking writes to each socket as needed.

My questions are as follows:

Is this possible using only IO::Socket::*, ideally the 2.0+ versions? The documentation wasn't completely helpful in this regard. It kinda sorta suggested so, but nodes I found here suggested otherwise.
If it is possible, is it portable? Will it work on Linux, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, etc.?
If it's not, what are my alternatives? POE isn't an option, so do I need to get down and write the lower-level Socket.pm code myself, and if so, can someone point me towards any examples?

Any replies are greatly appreciated.

Comment on Non-blocking network IO in Perl?

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Re: Non-blocking network IO in Perl? by tachyon (Chancellor) on Aug 19, 2004 at 08:46 UTC
See IO::Socket::INET -- Jettero verses non-blocking in windows for extensive discussion and OS dependent options. cheers tachyon	[reply]
Re^2: Non-blocking network IO in Perl? by William G. Davis (Friar) on Aug 19, 2004 at 10:02 UTC
Ah, I knew it wouldn't be that simple to just use IO::Socket. I'll copy and adapt that code. Thanks tachyon.	[reply]
Re^3: Non-blocking network IO in Perl? by tachyon (Chancellor) on Aug 19, 2004 at 10:29 UTC
It is simple, unless you are on Win32 which of course is known to make the simple things hard and the hard things harder AOTBE. You may find that threading is a better option if you are on Win32. cheers tachyon	[reply]
Re^4: Non-blocking network IO in Perl? by William G. Davis (Friar) on Aug 19, 2004 at 11:52 UTC