It appears that my reading comprehension was poor yesterday. I've been fighting my own issues with stdio on windows (actually it seems to be related to issues of console inheritance and wperl), and it seems to have distorted my perception of the OP's problem.

You are correct, it makes no sense to spawn a second process just to create a selectable IO source. But, I wasn't advocating that approach. Despite the fact that I communicated so poorly as to make it sound like I was.

I recall our earlier exchange perfectly well.

My comments on Win32::Socketpair (note the 'p') stem from the fact that you referenced a thread where it was discussed as a possible solution. In this context, I felt that sharing the shortcomings of Win32::Socketpair that I had recently discovered may be helpful.