I agree with the previous answers, you'd jump to a lower-layer sysread to do this.

I usually use select immediately before each sysread, trying to read big chunks of data at one time. But I do this because, in the mean case, I manage more than one handle at one time, so I use select to make an intelligent wait upon multiple sources. If you only have to read from one handle, you'd probably go for a non-blocking read (if you have to do something else while data is arriving, of course).

And yes, I admit that I cheated a bit in my answer, because I added a "\n" in the data sent by the father, and a chomp in the kid :)