Hm, it appears that Win32 Perl's close also pretends. Oh well, your code is still using things that I've found very easy to break because they are just pretending (and are still pretty new).

select will only work on TCP/IP sockets under Win32.

If you are blocking until you are able to read, then just call read and let if block. Your code only has an advantage when you have more than pipe you wish to read from.

Just to put this in context, the only reason I'm even trying to do this is because wog pointed out on my last question that it's possible to start a child process *before* you start up MainWindow in a perl/tk app and not have the child process calls to POSIX::exit get screwy. What I really wanted was to just use fork and have the children exit when they were done getting a URL, but even if I call POSIX::exit it still trys to call TK::exit! arrrrghhh!!!

Anyway, thanks again for trying to help. I'll just have to keep at it. Your comment about just letting it block seems to work, but there is something strange about that too. I'll investigate and post later when I know more.

Erad