there are other modules on CPAN that can read a single caracter from the terminal:

• Term::InKey
• Term::ANSIScreen

though i never tested them on Windows, their documentation says they should work. you might find a PPM package for them, but they should be easy to install (even manually) because they are pure Perl modules.

might be useful for you:

• PPM::Repositories - a list of all known ppm package repositories
• perl -MCPAN on windows: Should I even try?

InKey works thanks. For some reason Komodo still produces an error... maybe i gotta stop using komodo and just do the command line thing...
Here is working code. The demo file in the distribution has some more to it.

#!/usr/bin/perl
 use strict;
 use lib qw(.);
 use Term::InKey;

 my ($x,$bullet);

 $|=1;

 &Clear;

 print "Hit a key: ";
 $x = &ReadKey;
 &Clear;

 print "You typed $x";
[download]


Komodo 3.52 spits out
Hit a key:
Not implemented on MSWin32: The handle is invalid at C:/Perl/lib/Term/InKey.pm line 32.

again this works in regular dos

And wow... *grumbles*

I looked back at my old code and guess what... it works...

I dont think ill be using komodo again anytime soon...

update: well.. thanks to GrandFather's help (again), have worked around this problem with komodo. Set it to debug in a seperate window...