FileHandles and threads may be useful to you. On linux, at least, you can share filehandles across threads, thru the fileno. That may help you find a way to communicate the fileno of the socket thru shared variables. You might be able to setup a system of shared-variables that signal the threads for that socket when they can send and/or recv. Another possibility would be to pass the socket to the threads in the ->create() statement, then use shared vars to signal them into action of send/recv. But I'm just brainstorming and wondering why you even need 2 threads, when 1 socket can do bi-directional communication? Can't you setup a protocol of some sort, that says, "hey this is a report", and just send it over the single socket? Unless the data is all being sent 1 way, and you don't want to interrupt it.....in that case how about setting up a second socket connection on a separate port for the reports?

This is the basic client I use, which splits itself for birdirectional communication. So all you need to do is in your server, send reports with a header like <report> $report </report>, and have your client regex for it and handle it.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use IO::Socket;

my ( $host, $port, $kidpid, $handle, $line );
#unless ( @ARGV == 2 ) { die "usage: $0 host port" }
( $host, $port ) = @ARGV || ('localhost',8989);

# create a tcp connection to the specified host and port
$handle = IO::Socket::INET->new(
    Proto    => "tcp",
    PeerAddr => $host,
    PeerPort => $port
  )
  or die "can't connect to port $port on $host: $!";
$handle->autoflush(1);    # so output gets there right away
print STDERR "[Connected to $host:$port]\n";

# split the program into two processes, identical twins
die "can't fork: $!" unless defined( $kidpid = fork() );

# the if{} block runs only in the parent process
if ($kidpid) {

    # copy the socket to standard output
    while ( defined( $line = <$handle> ) ) {
                      print STDOUT $line;
                      }
    kill( "TERM", $kidpid );    # send SIGTERM to child
}

# the else{} block runs only in the child process
else {

    # copy standard input to the socket
    while ( defined( $line = <STDIN> ) ) {
        print $handle $line;
    }
}
[download]