Hello Perl Monks, I will like to know if someone can help me, I have been reading for 2 days now and I am stuck; so I decide to come for help... I need a multi threaded TCP server listening on port 9000 for a GPS project. I have 2 different devices and each one sends the message in different format, one sends lines like:

(013632782450BP05000013632782450101005A2038.3383N10315.1368W000.004122
+0116.4900000000L00000000)(013632782450BP05000013632782450101005A2038.
+3383N10315.1368W000.0041225116.4900000000L00000000)(013632782450BP050
+00013632782450101005A2038.3383N10315.1368W000.0041255116.4900000000L0
+0000000)(013632782450BP00000013632782450HSO)(013632782450BP0500001363
+2782450101005A2038.3383N10315.1368W000.0041325116.4900000000L00000000
+)
[download]

and the other sends lines like: ##,imei:354779033965634,A; and sits there, waiting for the server to reply LOAD and then it replies back with the actual GPS data. I have been reading and using multiple approaches, but the hard thing its that the GPS dont send newline chars, so many solutions (such as NetServer::Generic or IO:Socket*...) don't work. Long story short, I was able to parse the first format with read but I still need to be able to get the other message, reply with LOAD and get the text. Once I get that text, I could process it with a regex... but I am still away from there, Any advice? Here is my code (which I also borrowed and modified from here):

#!/usr/bin/perl -w -T

package MyPackage;

use strict;
use base qw(Net::Server::PreFork); 
MyPackage->run({port => 9000, no_client_stdout => 1});

sub process_request {
    my $self = shift;
    eval {
        local $SIG{'ALRM'} = sub { die "Timed Out!\n" };
        my $timeout = 5; 
        my $sock = $self->{server}->{client};
        $sock->autoflush(1);
        $|=1;
        binmode $sock;
        my $buf;

        while (read ($sock, $buf, 94) != 0 ){
            #sleep(5);
            print $sock "client said '$buf'\r\n";
            print "client said '$buf'\r\n";
            alarm($timeout);
        }
        print $buf;
        alarm(0);
    };
    if ($@ =~ /timed out/i) {
        print STDOUT "Timed Out: $@.\r\n";
        return;
    }
}
[download]

Thank you All! Carlos