That would require you to be able to be in a wait state on the condition var and simultaneously waiting for IO that will never complete. Which isn't currently possible.

This is a recurrent problem for which Perl has no good solution. What is required is a asyncRead() function.

This is possible at the OS level on all modern OS's. aio_read() in *nix; ReadFile() with an OVERLAPPED struct on Windows. etc. But AFAIK, these have never been made available from Perl or CPAN.

There are several modules on CPAN that have AIO in their titles, but to the best of my knowledge they all mock up true asynchronous IO using event loops and other user space dispatchers, which makes them flaky and non-portable and (again, to the best of my knowledge) unsuitable for use with threads.